Energy Efficient Spectrum Sensing and Handoff Strategies in Cognitive Radio Networks

The limited spectrum resources and dramatic growth of high data rate communications have motivated opportunistic spectrum access using the promising concept of cognitive radio networks. Although this concept has emerged primarily to enhance spectrum utilization, the importance of energy consumption poses new challenges, because energy efficiency and communication performance can be at odds. In this paper, the existing approaches to energy efficiency spectrum sensing and handoff are classified. The tradeoff between energy consumption and throughput is established as function of the numerous design parameters of cognitive radio networks, both in the case of local and of cooperative spectrum sensing. It is argued that a number of important aspects still needs to be researched, such as fairness, dynamic behavior, reactive and proactive schemes for energy efficiency.