Cooperation-Based Network Coding in Cognitive Radio Networks

We consider a scenario consisting of a primary and a secondary system, each represented by a pair of a transmitter and a receiver. The secondary transmitter assists in the retransmission of the primary message, which prevents the primary performance from being degraded by allowing the secondary system to access the transmission resources. Two network coding schemes applied in retransmission phase are investigated, the stationary network coding (SNC) scheme and the adaptive network coding (ANC) scheme. For each scheme we derive analytical results on packet throughput and infer that the ANC scheme outperforms the SNC scheme. We then provide a numerical performance comparison and a numerical optimization of the secondary packet throughput. Our main result shows cooperation can provide a significant performance improvement through effective network coding.