Adaptive Transmission Schemes for Spectrum Sharing Systems: Trade-offs and Performance Analysis

Adaptive Transmission Schemes for Spectrum Sharing Systems: Trade-offs and Performance Analysis Zied Bouida, PhD. Concordia University, 2015 Cognitive radio (CR) represents a key solution to the existing spectrum scarcity problem. Under the scenario of CR, spectrum sharing systems allow the coexistence of primary users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs) in the same spectrum as long as the interference from the secondary to the primary link stays below a given threshold. In this thesis, we propose a number of adaptive transmission schemes aiming at improving the performance of the secondary link in these systems while satisfying the interference constraint set by the primary receiver (PR). In the proposed techniques, the secondary transmitter (ST) adapts its transmission settings based on the availability of the channel state information (CSI) of the secondary and the interference links. In this context, these schemes offer different performance tradeoffs in terms of spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and overall complexity. In the first proposed scheme, power adaptation (PA) and adaptive modulation (AM) are jointly used with switched transmit diversity in order to increase the capacity of the secondary link while minimizing the average number of antenna switching. Then, the concept of minimum-selection maximum ratio transmission (MS-MRT) is proposed as an adaptive variation of maximum ratio transmission (MRT) in a spectrum sharing scenario in order to maximize the capacity of the secondary link while minimizing the average number of transmit antennas. In order to achieve this performance, MS-MRT assumes that the secondary’s CSI (SCSI) is perfectly known at the ST, which makes this scheme challenging from a practical point of view. To overcome this challenge, another transmission technique based on orthogonal space time bloc codes (OSTBCs) with transmit antenna selection (TAS) is proposed. This scheme uses the full-rate full-diversity Alamouti scheme in an underlay CR scenario in order to maximize the secondary’s transmission rate.