Energy efficiency of full-duplex cognitive radio in low-power regimes under imperfect spectrum sensing

Abstract

This paper investigates the energy efficiency of a full duplex (FD) cognitive radio (CR) system in the low-power regime under a practical self-interference cancellation performance and imperfect spectrum sensing. We consider an opportunistic spectrum access network in which the secondary user (SU) is capable of self-interference suppression (SIS). The SIS ability enables the SU to work in simultaneous transmit and sense (TS) mode in order to increase the quality of channel sensing. Towards this goal, we first study the sensing performance, i.e., false-alarm and miss-detection probabilities, of the FD CR networks using TS, and compare the results with traditional half duplex (HD) CR systems using transmit only mode (TO). In the next step, we show that due to imperfect spectrum sensing, the secondary network channel is best characterized as a Gaussian-Mixture (GM) channel, which is widely used to capture the asynchronism in heterogeneous cellular networks. We then analytically characterize the low-signal-to-noise-ratio (low-SNR) metrics of the minimum energy per bit and wideband slope of the spectral-efficiency curve, and obtain these fundamental limits in closed-form. Furthermore, the characterization of these fundamental metrics allows us to identify practical signaling strategies that are optimally efficient in the low-SNR regime for the considered FD CR system. The benefits in terms of energy efficiency offered by FD CR over HD CR are also clearly demonstrated.