The visiting and less-privileged status of the secondary users (SUs) in a cognitive radio network obligates them to release the occupied channel instantly when it is reclaimed by the primary user. The SU has a choice to make: either wait for the channel to become free, thus conserving energy at the expense of delayed transmission and delivery, or find and switch to a vacant channel, thereby avoiding delay in transmission at the expense of increased energy consumption. An energy-efficient decision that considers the tradeoff between energy consumption and continuous transmission needs to be taken as to whether to switch the channels. In this work, we consider a sensor network-assisted cognitive radio network and propose a backup channel, which is sensed by the SU in parallel with the operating channel that is being sensed by the sensor nodes. Imperfect channel sensing and residual energy of the SU are considered in order to develop an energy-efficient handoff strategy using the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which considers beliefs about the operating and backup channels and the remaining energy of the SU in order to take an optimal channel handoff decision on the question “Should we switch the channel?” The objective is to dynamically decide in each time slot whether the SU should switch the channel or not in order to maximize throughput by utilizing energy efficiently. Extensive simulations were performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed channel handoff strategy, which was demonstrated in the form of throughput with respect to various parameters, i.e., detection probability, the channel idle probabilities of the operating and backup channels, and the maximum energy of the SU.
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