Sensing and Transmit Energy Optimization for an Energy Harvesting Cognitive Radio

We consider a cognitive radio setting in which the secondary user is an energy harvester with a finite capacity battery. The primary user operates in a time-slotted fashion. At the beginning of each time slot, the secondary user, aiming at maximizing its throughput, may remain idle or carry out spectrum sensing to detect primary activity. The decision is determined by the secondary belief regarding primary activity and the amount of stored energy. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process. We illustrate the optimal policy, compare it with a myopic policy, and investigate the variation of throughput with various system parameters.