Cognitive Multihoming System for Energy and Cost Aware Video Transmission

Abstract

To alleviate the spectrum scarcity problem in the licensed cellular networks (LCNs), we introduce a new paradigm called cognitive multihoming (CM), where a cognitive radio (CR)-enabled base station transmits to the users simultaneously over the licensed cellular bands and primary user bands in CR networks (CRNs). The CR aspect incurs lower cost, however, at the expense of higher energy consumption due to intermittent channel sensing. On the other hand, transmission via LCN is expensive because of its licensing premium. To minimize the transmission cost while meeting the users energy and received video quality constraints, sensing duration and transmission rate over CRN, transmission rate over LCN, and network selection for retransmission of lost packets are adjusted. Solution to the multiuser resource allocation optimization problem is obtained by solving the cost minimization problem of a single-user system. The problem is nonconvex which is solved using convex-concave procedure. The proposed scheme is compared with the cases where a user operates over a single network, either LCN or CRN. The system performance results indicate that the proposed CM strategy significantly decreases the cost to the users as well as serves a higher number of users while maintaining the desired video quality and energy consumption constraints.