Adaptive Rate and Power Transmission for OFDM-based Cognitive Radio Systems

This paper studies the joint rate and power allocation problem for OFDM-based cognitive radio systems where secondary users (SUs) can opportunistically access the spectrum of primary users (PUs). We propose a novel algorithm that jointly maximizes the OFDM-based cognitive radio system throughput and minimizes its transmit power, while guaranteeing a target bit error rate per subcarrier and restricting both co-channel interference (CCI) and adjacent channel interference (ACI) to existing primary users. Since estimating the instantaneous channel gains on the links between the SU transmitter and the PUs receivers is impractical, we assume only knowledge of the path loss on these links. Closed-form expressions are derived for the close-to-optimal bit and power distributions. Simulation results are described that illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme and show its closeness to that of an exhaustive search for the discrete optimal allocations. Further, the results quantify the violation ratio of both the CCI and ACI constraints at the PUs receivers due to the partial channel information. The effect of adding a fading margin to reduce the violation ratio is also studied.