Channel allocation for cooperative relays in cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we investigate channel allocation for cooperative relays in cognitive radio networks. Different from conventional cooperative relay channels, cognitive radio relay channels are actually a combination of three kinds of channels: direct, dual-hop, and relay channels, which belong to different spectrum bands and provide parallel end-to-end transmission. In order to maximize the achievable end-to-end throughput, we propose two channel allocation approaches with different complexities to assign all the channels cooperatively. Numerical results illustrate the performance improvement in different number of available channels. In particular, it has about 40% improvement in throughput when the average SNR is 15 dB and eight available channels are used.