Improved Spectrum-Sharing Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks With Multiuser Cooperation

This paper proposes an improved spectrum-sharing protocol for multiuser cooperation in cognitive radio (CR) networks. In CR networks, a secondary user (SU) can access the licensed bands of a primary user (PU) as compensation for cooperative transmission. During cooperative transmission, the SU concurrently transmits its own signal and network-coded signal from the PUs. However, detection errors at the SU cause error propagation which degrades the performance of the PU and SU. To address this problem, we develop a cooperative maximal-ratio combining scheme that mitigates the error propagation and achieves diversity gain. To evaluate the combining scheme, we derive a diversity order and closed-form bit error rate (BER) expression for arbitrary M-QAM at high SNR. The analysis results show that the diversity order and BER depend on the fraction of the transmit power at the SU. Based on the dependency of the fraction factor, we propose an optimization problem to minimize the BER of the SU while guaranteeing the PU´s BER. Further, we apply the BER-constrained optimization problem to the adaptive modulation system. Simulation results show that the proposed cooperation provides full diversity gain to the PU and thus improves its spectral efficiency by using the optimized fraction factor.