Cooperative Spectrum Sharing in Spectrum Domain with Discrete Time Energy Harvesting for Primary User

In this paper, we propose a spectrum sharing protocol for cognitive radio networks with an energy-constraint primary transmitter (PT), which performs energy harvesting from the received radio frequency (RF) signals broadcasting by two secondary users (SUs). After the amount of harvested energy at the PT is sufficient for data transmission, a SU will cooperatively forward PT's signal using amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme along with transmitting its own signal to increase the spectrum efficiency of the system. To be specific, the data transmission block can be divided into two phases. During the first phase, the PT will optimally select a relay from nodes S1 and S2 in order to further improve the overall throughput, then the PT transmits primary signal to the selected SU and primary receiver (PR), respectively, while the non-selected SU transmits signal to secondary receiver (SR). In the second phase, the selected SU transmits signals of both the primary and secondary systems simultaneously. A discrete Markov chain is used to simulate the charging and discharging processes of the PT's battery. In order to avoid mutual interference between the primary and secondary systems, a fraction of spectrum is used to transmit primary data and the residual spectrum is served for data transmission of the secondary system. An appropriate bandpass filter (BF) is deployed at the receive front-end of each receiver to extract the desired signals from assigned bandwidth. Based on this, the exact expressions of the outage probabilities for both the primary and secondary systems are derived. Moreover, the optimal bandwidth allocation coefficient is determined by utilizing convex optimization to maximize the achievable rate of the secondary system while guaranteeing the achievable rate of the secondary system in information transmission mode. Numerical results show that the proposed spectrum sharing protocol outperforms to other scheme and non-cooperative scenario in terms of average spectrum efficiency.

Automated summary

In this paper, a spectrum sharing protocol for cognitive radio networks is proposed, which improves system spectrum efficiency through energy harvesting and signal forwarding. The system performance is optimized through two phases of data transmission blocks and bandwidth allocation coefficients.