Hybrid Spectrum Sharing with Cooperative Secondary User Selection in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we propose a cooperative hybrid spectrum sharing protocol by jointly considering interweave (opportunistic) and underlay schemes. In the proposed protocol, secondary users can access the licensed spectrum along with the primary system. Our network scenario comprises a single primary transmitter-receiver (PTx-PRx) pair and a group of M secondary transmitter-receiver (STx-SRx) pairs within the transmission range of the primary system. Secondary transmitters are divided into two groups: active and inactive. A secondary transmitter that gets an opportunity to access the secondary spectrum is called “active”. One of the idle or inactive secondary transmitters that achieves the primary request target rate RPT will be selected as a best decode-and-forward (DF) relay (Re) to forward the primary information when the data rate of the direct link between PTx and PRx falls below RPT. We investigate the ergodic capacity and outage probability of the primary system with cooperative relaying and outage probability of the secondary system. Our theoretical and simulation results show that both the primary and secondary systems are able to achieve performance improvement in terms of outage probability. It is also shown that ergodic capacity and outage probability improve when the active secondary transmitter is located farther away from the PRx.