Performance analysis of joint power control, rate adaptation, and channel selection strategies for Cognitive Radio Networks

This article proposes a joint power control, rate adaptation and channel selection strategy for Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) operating over vacant TV bands, also known as TV Bands Devices (TVBDs). To exploit the abundance of vacant channels available at the disposal of these devices, we combine the well-studied power and rate adaptation strategies with adaptive channel selection. The combined strategy maximizes the achievable throughput while guaranteeing a desired level of performance, i.e., error and outage probabilities. It also reduces the chances of causing or being subject to harmful interference to/from other co-channel users. Furthermore, to waive the processing complexity resulting from the frequent channel switching, we propose an alternative strategy that switches the operating channel only when the operating channel fails to support the least supportable data rate. For the two strategies, we derive closed form expressions for the average data rates and transmission powers. The accuracy of the derived results as well as the performance gains achieved are verified using intensive numerical and simulations results.