Capacity and Energy Efficiency of Multi-User Spectrum Sharing Systems with Opportunistic Scheduling

This paper investigates the capacity and energy efficiency of spectrum sharing systems with opportunistic user selection where a secondary network utilizes spectrum bands licensed to a primary network under interference regulation. In spectrum sharing systems, secondary users consume a fraction of their resources in sensing the channels to the primary users to comply with the interference constraints. Although more resources for sensing improve reliability and performance, the throughput loss due to time overhead and energy loss due to power overhead should be properly incorporated in performance evaluation. In this context, we define and derive a new metric average capacity normalized by the total energy consumption - reflecting time and power overhead for spectrum sensing. Based on the developed framework, the optimal normalized-capacity is investigated. We also propose a simple and practical suboptimal best-n scheme motivated by the infeasibility and high computational complexity of the optimal strategy, where n denotes the number of sensing secondary users. Our analytical and simulation results show that the proposed best-1 scheme is an energy-efficient technique with near optimality in terms of the capacity normalized by the energy consumption.