Opportunistic adaptive relaying in cognitive radio networks

Combining cognitive radio technology with user cooperation could be advantageous to both primary and secondary transmissions. In this paper, we propose a first relaying scheme for cognitive radio networks (called “Adaptive relaying scheme 1”), where one relay node can assist the primary or the secondary transmission with the objective of improving the outage probability of the secondary transmission with respect to a primary outage probability threshold. Upper bound expressions of the secondary outage probability using the proposed scheme are derived over Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical and simulation results show that the secondary outage probability using the proposed scheme is lower than that of other relaying schemes. Then, we extend the proposed scheme to the case where the relay node has the ability to decode both the primary and secondary signals and also can assist simultaneously both transmissions. Simulations show the performance improvement that can be obtained due to this extension in terms of secondary outage probability.