Joint cooperative relay scheme for spectrum-efficient usage and capacity improvement in cognitive radio networks

In order to improve the efficiency of spectrum resource usage and the capacity of wireless networks, cooperative relay techniques which utilize the vacant spectrum of primary users for secondary users’ data transmission have been applied in cognitive radio networks. Considering the dynamic time-varying vacant spectrum resources and achievable rate on different channels at relay nodes (RN), the traditional fixed time slot allocation scheme for cooperative RNs has the bottleneck for further improving the spectrum usage efficiency and system throughput. Therefore, the joint cooperative relay scheme with RN selection, channel allocation and dynamic time slot allocation (DyTSA), is designed to increase the spectrum usage efficiency and system capacity by dynamic tuning DyTSA ratio to adapt to the changing radio environment in multiple RNs serving multiple destinations scenario. Propositions of the proposed scheme are proved theoretically by closed-form solutions. Numerical results verify the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed scheme.