EHWPTCRN-energy harvesting using wireless power transfer for cognitive radio networks with 802.11 (DCF) MAC protocol

In cognitive radio, secondary users (SU) have limited energy to utilize the spectrum; therefore, energy harvesting is required to increase the system’s performance. In an energy-saving cognitive radio network, operating nodes efficiently while minimizing energy consumption is a great challenge. In most of the earlier works, slotted protocols have been used, which characterize the deterministic analysis and are limited to their lower performance in energy consumption, which may not be more appropriate for real-time solutions to future wireless networking. We have proposed an energy-efficient wireless power transfer method for cognitive radio applications with IEEE 802.11 (DCF) random access MAC protocol to address these issues. In this work, wireless power transfer occurs in random slots onto SU in their sleep state, and DCF protocol-based MAC scheduling is employed for wireless information transfer. The 802.11 (DCF) has been characterized by a 2D Markov chain model and adapted to our proposed energy harvesting model. The SUs transmit and receive the data during the data transceiver state. While in sleep mode, they harvest the radio power received from the hybrid access point and store it in their battery for future use. The experimental results show that with our proposed scheme, the energy consumption is reduced by up to $$32\%$$ 32 % for different contention window sizes w.r.t. distance. Moreover, at the different values of the path loss exponent, energy consumption is reduced by up to $$11\%$$ 11 % , w.r.t. number of SUs. In addition, energy consumption is reduced by up to $$12\%$$ 12 % at the variation of energy efficiency.