Energy Efficient Information Sharing in Social Cognitive Radio Networks

The growing usage of the devices and the popular high data rate services is increasing the demand for radio resources and the associated energy consumption. Cognitive radio (CR) technology has been proposed as a solution to improve spectrum utilization, enabling the devices to identify alternate frequency bands and opportunistically use them. We propose a novel social-cognitive radio (S-CR) architecture able to improve the network energy efficiency. The key aspect of the such solution is the resulting indirect form of cooperation. Indeed, the devices only share information about channel availability and device profile information, without any predefined cooperation to perform a common task, such as cooperative spectrum sensing. In this way, it is possible to reduce some energy demanding operations of the cognitive cycle, such as the sensing procedure, since the social information sharing requires less energy. A novel S-CR protocol is developed to share environmental information and allocate spectrum resources to the CRs. Simulation results compare the S-CR protocol with its non-social version and reveal the effectiveness of the proposed solution in terms of energy consumption reduction.