Energy-efficient secondary traffic scheduling with MIMO beamforming

When equipped with multiple antennas, secondary users in cognitive radio networks are able to communicate even when neighboring primary users are active by transmitting in the null space of the communication channel occupied by primary users. In this case, the throughput of a secondary link is limited by the transmission power and the dimension of the null space, i.e., the number of active primary users nearby. Since the number of active primary users is time-varying, the required transmission power to support certain data rate changes from time to time. Thus, secondary users could adapt their transmission to the variation of the primary traffic to improve energy efficiency. In view of that, we develop an energy-efficient traffic scheduling scheme for secondary users equipped with multiple antennas. By formulating the traffic scheduling problem as a Markov decision problem, an energy-efficient transmission scheme is derived from linear programming. The analytical results are verified by simulations and the impacts of various parameters are discussed. The superiority of the derived scheme is also shown by comparing with a randomized scheme.