Distributed Beamforming for Two-Way DF Relay Cognitive Networks Under Primary–Secondary Mutual Interference

In this paper, we consider collaborative beamforming for a cooperative two-way relay spectrum-sharing system where a pair of secondary transceivers communicates via a set of secondary decode-and-forward (DF) relays in the presence of multiple primary transceivers. Among the available relays, only those that receive the signals reliably participate in the cooperative beamforming process and use network coding to simultaneously transmit the weighted signals to the transceivers. Two practical two-way relaying strategies are investigated, namely, DF- xoring and DF-superposition. The former is based on bitwise-level xoring of the detected signals at the relays, whereas the latter is based on symbolwise-level addition at the relays. For each relaying strategy, we derive general optimal beamforming vectors at the relays to keep the interference inflicted on the primary receivers to a predefined threshold. Employing zero-forcing beamforming as a special case, we present an analytical framework of the performance of the secondary system considering the effect of the primary–secondary mutual cochannel interference (CCI). In particular, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability, bit error rate (BER), and achievable sum rates over independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of beamforming in compensating for the cognitive system performance loss due to CCI in addition to mitigating the interference to the primary receivers. Simulation results also show that, when the received signals at the relays are equally weighted, DF- xor always outperforms both DF-superposition and amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying.