On the throughput scaling of Cognitive Radio ad hoc networks

Due to the emergence of Cognitive Radio, a special type of heterogeneous networks attracts increasing interest recently, in which a secondary network composed of cognitive users shares the same resources opportunistically with a primary network of licensed users. Network throughput in this setting is of essential importance. Some pioneer works in this area showed that this type of heterogeneous networks performs as well as two stand-alone networks, under the dense network model where the size of a network grows with the node density in a fixed area. A key assumption behind this conclusion is that the density of the secondary network is higher than that of the primary one in the order sense, which essentially decouples the two overlaid networks, as the secondary network dominates asymptotically. In this paper we endeavor to investigate this problem with a weaker condition that the dimensions of the two overlaid networks are on the same order, and consider the extended network model where the size of a network scales with the area with the node density fixed. Surprisingly, our analysis shows that this weaker (and arguably more practical) condition does not degrade either network throughput in terms of scaling law. Our result further reveals the potentials of CR technology in real applications.