Outage analysis of multi-relay selection for cognitive radio with imperfect spectrum sensing

In this paper, we examine the outage performance of a cognitive relay network, which is comprised of a secondary transmitter (ST), multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays and a secondary destination (SD). We propose a multi-relay selection scheme for the cognitive relay network, where multiple relays are selected and used to participate in forwarding the secondary transmission from ST to SD. A closed-form expression of the outage probability for the proposed multi-relay selection under imperfect spectrum sensing is derived in Rayleigh fading environments. For comparison purposes, the conventional direct transmission and the best-relay selection are also considered as benchmarks. Numerical results show that as the spectrum sensing performance improves with an increasing detection probability and/or a decreasing false alarm probability, the outage probabilities of the proposed multi-relay selection as well as the direct transmission and the best-relay selection schemes all decrease accordingly. It is also demonstrated that the proposed multi-relay selection significantly outperforms the conventional approaches in terms of the outage probability.