Integration of Cooperative Sensing and Transmission

In this article, some aspects of cognitive radio (CR) technologies and cooperation strategies are discussed. The findings show that cooperative sensing enhances decision making by collaborating cognitive users (CUs). Primary users (PU) protection increases by OR rule and opportunistic access increases for CUs if collaborated using AND rule. It can also be observed that cooperative relaying benefits from path-loss saving, power gain due to the fact that the relay may add additional transmit power, and diversity gain in the presence of fading. In addition, the network performance is also enhanced by the increase in achievable data rates when using cooperative relay when compared with the rates achieved without relay. Cooperative communication technique can further enhance the transmission capacity of a communication system, while CR technique can improve the spectrum utilization ratio. Doubtless, the integration of the two technologies will have a great impact on network architecture, terminals, service models, and applications of future wireless mobile communication.