Spectrum-sharing broadcast channels using fountain codes: energy, delay and throughput

In this study, the authors develop a transmission protocol for cognitive radio networks, whereby fountain codes are exploited in the broadcast channels and secondary users help with the broadcast from the base station (BS) to primary users (PUs). With fountain codes, the BS broadcasts to the secondary transmitter (ST) as well as PUs simultaneously, and stops broadcasting once the ST has received sufficient codeword to decode the original information reliably. Then, the ST will resume the broadcasting to PUs until all of them can decode the original information successfully. While broadcasting, the ST transmits information over its own link, that is, to the secondary receiver, based on dirty paper coding technique. As such, the energy expenditure at the BS is reduced and, moreover, secondary links have more opportunities to access the licensed spectrum band. To evaluate the performance of the developed scheme, they analyse its energy expenditure, broadcast time as well as the throughput over secondary links, and achieve the corresponding closed-form expressions. Compared with the traditional broadcast protocol without the secondary´s help, illustrative numerical results substantiate the validity of the author´s derivations, which also demonstrate the efficiency of the developed scheme both on the energy savings and on the spectrum utilisation.