Secondary Users (SUs) are allowed to use the temporarily unused licensed spectrum without disturbing Primary Users (PUs) in Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks (CRAHNs). Existing architectures for CRAHNs impose energy-consuming Cognitive Radios (CRs) on SUs. However, the advanced CRs will increase energy cost for their cognitive functionalities, which is undesirable for the battery powered devices. A new architecture referred to as spectral Requirement-based CRAHN (RCRAHN) is proposed to enhance energy efficiency for CRAHNs in this paper. In RCRAHNs, only parts of SUs are equipped with CRs. SUs equipped with CRs are referred to as Cognitive Radio Users (CRUs). To further enhance energy efficiency of CRAHNs, we aim to select minimum CRUs to sense available spectrum. A non-linear programming problem is mathematically formulated under the constraints of energy efficiency and real-time. Considering the NP-hardness of the problem, a framework of a heuristic algorithm referred to as Sensitive Secondary Users Selection (SSUS) was designed to compute the near-optimal solutions. The simulation results demonstrate that SSUS not only improves the energy efficiency, but also achieves satisfied performances in end-to-end delay and communication reliability.
Keywords: CRAHNs; SSUS; energy efficiency; network architecture; real-time.