Sensor-Network-Aided Cognitive Radio: On the Optimal Receiver for Estimate-and-Forward Protocols Applied to the Relay Channel

Cognitive radio describes a promising concept for improving the utilization of radio spectrum. It allows secondary users to access licensed radio spectrum in an opportunistic fashion, given that the quality of service for primary users is maintained. In this scenario, the detection of unused radio spectrum is the main obstacle: it requires the recognition of low- power signals in a noisy environment. Therefore, we consider the case where cognitive users are supported by a wireless sensor network (WSN) providing beliefs on the event that the primary user is active. The beliefs provided by the WSN nodes are then combined by the cognitive radio in order to make a final decision. Due to limitations in complexity, power, and bandwidth, the WSN nodes apply the estimate-and-forward protocol to communicate their beliefs and to relay the beliefs of adjacent nodes. For the case where the WSN is subject to noisy communication links, we derive and analyze the optimal receiver which provides the cognitive radio with log-likelihood ratios for the estimated and forwarded hypotheses. The performance of the optimal receiver is compared to the performance of sub-optimal receivers.