Opportunistic relaying based spectrum leasing for cognitive radio networks

Spectrum leasing for cognitive radio (CR) networks is an effective way to improve the spectrum utilization. This paper presents an opportunistic relaying based spectrum leasing for CR networks where the primary users lease their frequency band to the cognitive users. The cognitive users act as relays for the primary users to improve the channel capacity, and this improved capacity is used for the transmission of secondary users´ data. We show that the cognitive users can use a significant portion of the communication resource of primary networks while maintaining a fixed target data rate for the primary users. Moreover, the primary network is also benefited by the cooperating cognitive users in terms of outage probability. Information theoretic analysis and simulation results are presented to evaluate the performances of both primary and cognitive networks.