Performance analysis of relay-assisted cognitive radio systems with superposition coding

We study the problem of relay selection in a cooperative cognitive radio system in which a secondary transmitter can act as a relay for the primary transmitter in order to maximize the primary user's gain. Moreover, we take into account that the secondary users may have certain quality-of-service (QoS) requirements which need to be satisfied. In the cooperative scenario of a cognitive radio system, the primary user should have an incentive to allow the secondary user to transmit in its licensed band. At the same time, the secondary user should be able to transmit its own data with the required QoS in order to be willing to help the primary user's performance by relaying its data. Hence, we take into account both primary and secondary users' objectives. We use numerical methods in order to study how different parameters, such as assigned powers in the coding scheme, direct link reliability, and the number of secondary users affect the overall system performance. Our results show that the gain, which the primary user can achieve by cooperation, highly depends on the quality of its direct link as well as the secondary users' QoS requirements. Furthermore, the percentage of cooperation instances between secondary users and the primary user is dependent on the amount of power the secondary users allocate for relaying the primary's signal based on the direct link quality.