Improvement of Underlay Cooperative Cognitive Networks Bandwidth Efficiency under Interference and Power Constraints

The definition of the bandwidth efficiency (BE) of cognitive cooperative network (CCN) is the ratio between a number of the licensed slot(s) or sub-channel(s) used by the unlicensed users to transmit a single data packet from the unlicensed transmitter to unlicensed destination, and from unlicensed relay(s) to unlicensed destination. This paper analyzes and improves the BE in the underlay CCN with a new reactive relay selection under interference and power constraints. In other words, this paper studies how unlicensed cooperative users use the licensed network slot(s) or sub-channel(s) efficiently. To this end, a reactive relay selection method named as Relay Automatic Repeat Request (RARQ) is proposed and utilized with a CCN under interference and power constraints. It is shown that the BE of CCN is higher than that of cooperative transmission (CT) due to the interference and power constraint. Furthermore, the BE of CCN is affected by the distance of the interference links which are between the unlicensed transmitter to the licensed destination and unlicensed relay to the licensed destination. In addition, the BE for multiple relays selection over a CCN under interference and power constraints is also analyzed and studied, and it is shown that the BE of CCN decreases as the number of relays increases.