Throughput Maximization for a Primary User with Cognitive Radio and Energy Harvesting Functions

In this paper, we consider an advanced wireless user, called primary-secondary user (PSU) who is capable of harvesting renewable energy and connecting to both the primary network and cognitive radio networks simultaneously. Recently, energy harvesting has received a great deal of attention from the research community and is a promising approach for maintaining long lifetime of users. On the other hand, the cognitive radio function allows the wireless user to access other primary networks in an opportunistic manner as secondary users in order to receive more throughput in the current time slot. Subsequently, in the paper we propose the channel access policy for a PSU with consideration of the energy harvesting, based on a Partially Observable Markov decision process (POMDP) in which the optimal action from the action set will be selected to maximize expected long-term throughput. The simulation results show that the proposed POMDP-based channel access scheme improves the throughput of PSU, but it requires more computations to make an action decision regarding channel access.