Adaptive power loading for OFDM-based cognitive radio systems

Cognitive radio (CR) technology is an innovative radio design philosophy which aims to increase spectrum utilization by exploiting unused spectrum in dynamically changing environments. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a potential modulation technique for CR networks' air interface. In this paper, we study and explore optimal power loading algorithm for an OFDM-based CR system and the rate in each subcarrier is adjusted according to the power. As such the downlink capacity of the CR user is maximized while the interference introduced to the primary user remains within a tolerable range. We also propose two suboptimal loading algorithms that have less complexity. The performance of optimal and suboptimal schemes are compared with the performance of classical power loading algorithms that are used for conventional OFDM-based systems e.g., water-filling and uniform power but variable rate loading schemes. Presented numerical results show that for a given interference threshold the proposed optimal scheme allows the CR users to transmit more power in order to achieve higher transmission rate than the classical loading algorithms. These results also show that the proposed suboptimal schemes offer a performance close to the optimal scheme. Finally, we study the effect of subcarrier nulling mechanism on the performance of different algorithms under consideration.