Outage performance of Decode and Forward incremental relaying in an overlay spectrum sharing environment

This article analyzes the outage performance of Decode and Forward (DF) incremental relaying when used in an overlay spectrum sharing environment. The terminals of a secondary network exploit the instances of silence of a neighboring primary user to communicate with each other. Secondary terminals utilize an arbitrary spectrum sensing method that is prone to miss-detection and false alarms. The derived closed-form results unveil the losses incurred due to inaccurate spectrum sensing and Co-Channel Interference (CCI). The accuracy of the derived results was verified using computer simulations.