Protocol design and throughput analysis for multi-user cognitive cooperative systems

This paper deals with protocol design for cognitive cooperative systems with many secondary users. In contrast with previous cognitive configurations, the channel model considered assumes a cluster of secondary users which perform both a sensing process for transmitting opportunities and can relay data for the primary user. Appropriate relaying improves the throughput of the primary users and can increase the transmission opportunities for the cognitive users. Based on different multi-access protocols, the schemes investigated enable relaying either between the primary user and a selected secondary user or between two selected secondary users. This collaboration can be a simple distributed multiple-input single-output transmission of the primary data or a simultaneous transmission of primary and secondary data using dirty-paper coding (DPC). The parametrization of DPC as well as its combination with opportunistic relay selection yields an interesting trade-off between the primary and the secondary performance which is investigated by theoretical and simulation results under the perspective of a desired primary throughput. The proposed protocols are studied from a networking point of view and the stable throughput for primary and secondary users is derived based on the principles of queueing theory.