Fairness and throughput enhancement based resource allocation scheme for underlay cognitive radio networks

Acquiring good throughput and diminishing interference to primary users (PU) are the main objectives for secondary users in a cognitive radio (CR) network. This paper proposes a centralized subcarrier and power allocation scheme for underlay multi-user orthogonal frequency division multiplexing considering the rate loss and the interference those the PU can tolerate. The main purpose of the proposed scheme is to efficiently distribute the available subcarriers among cognitive users to enhance both the fairness and the throughput performance of the cognitive network while maintaining the QoS of primary users. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a significantly higher CR network throughput than that of the conventional interference power constraint (IPC) based schemes and provides a significantly enhanced fairness performance. Also, contrary to the conventional IPC based schemes, the proposed scheme is able to significantly increase the achieved throughput as the number of CR users increases.