Outage performance of cognitive radio networks with multiple decode‐and‐forward relays

Abstract

Summary This paper considers the cognitive radio network with one primary user (PU), one secondary user (SU), and multiple decode‐and‐forward relays. We propose a relaying scheme to ensure the priority of primary transmission, where the relays are used to forward PU's message and sometimes also SU's message. First, SU is allowed to use the spectrum to transmit only when its transmission would not affect the decoding status of PU's message at all relays. Second, once the secondary transmission happens, the relays that successively decode SU's message are allowed to retransmit this message when it would not affect the decoding status of PU's message at primary receiver. The interference from PU to SU and the interference from SU to PU are both considered. By analyzing the decoding status of primary message and secondary message at different relays, we formulate the outage probabilities of both primary transmission and secondary transmission. When all channels follow Rayleigh distributions, we derive the analytical expressions for the general case of any number of relays, which are validated by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.