Exploitation of spatial diversity in a novel cooperative spectrum sharing method based on PAM and modified PAM modulation

This article presents a novel cooperative spectrum sharing (CSS) scheme. The primary transmitter transmits a complex Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signal in the first phase, and CSS occurs in the second phase. The secondary transmitter with the largest forwarding channel gain among the nodes that successfully decode the primary signal in the first phase is selected for CSS. This selected node employs a pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM) signal for primary information message (IM) instead of the QAM signal, and it employs a modified PAM signal for the secondary IM. The proposed modified PAM signal depends on the amplitude of the primary PAM signal. This method results in no mutual interference and negligible primary interference constraint and allows a higher degree of exploitation of spatial diversity, thus enabling increase in secondary power to improve primary transmission. The outage performance is enhanced in both the primary and secondary systems. The critical region, in which the primary outage performance is enhanced with the proposed CSS scheme, can be adjusted and widened by varying either the modulation cooperation sharing factor or the number of secondary transmitters.