Collaborative Distributed Beamforming for Spectrum-Sharing Systems

The scarcity of bandwidth has always been the main obstacle for providing reliable high date-rate wireless links, which are in great demand to accommodate nowadays and immediate future wireless applications. In addition, recent reports have showed inefficient usage and under-utilization of the available bandwidth. Cognitive radio (CR) has recently emerged as a promising solution to enhance the spectrum utilization, where it offers the ability for unlicensed users to access the licensed spectrum opportunistically. On one hand, by allowing opportunistic spectrum access, the overall spectrum utilization can be improved. On the other hand, transmission from cognitive nodes can cause severe interference to the licensed users of the spectrum. This requires cognitive radio networks (CRNs) to consider two essential design targets, namely, maximizing the spectrum utilization and minimizing the interference caused to the primary users (PUs). Such interference can be reduced through proper resource allocation, power control or other degrees of freedom techniques such as beamforming. In this thesis, we aim to use joint distributed beamforming and cooperative relaying in spectrum-sharing systems in an effort to enhance the spectrum efficiency and improve the performance of the secondary system. We investigate a one-way cooperative spectrum-sharing system in the presence of one PU and multiple PUs. We study two relaying schemes, namely, decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying in conjunction with distributed optimal beamforming. We employ zero forcing beamforming (ZFB) as a sub-optimal scheme, and compare both approaches through simulations. For both schemes, we derive closed-form expressions and asymptotic expressions for the outage probability and bit error rate (BER) over independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) schemes. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the combination of the cooperative diversity and distributed beamforming in compensating for the loss in the secondary system's performance due to the primary user's co-channel interference (CCI). To further improve the spectrum efficiency, we employ distributed beamforming in two-way AF cooperative spectrum-sharing systems in the presence of multiple PUs. For this system, we investigate the transmission protocols over two, three and four time-slots. Our results show that the three time-slot protocol outperforms the two time-slot and four time-slot protocols in certain scenarios where it offers a good compromise between bandwidth efficiency and system performance. We extend the two-way relaying system to the DF scheme, where two practical two-way relaying strategies are investigated, namely, DF-XORing (bit-wise level) and DF-superposition (symbol-wise level). For each relaying strategy, we derive general optimal beamforming vectors and sup-optimal ZFB vectors at the relays. Employing ZFB, we present an analytical framework of the secondary system considering the effect of the primary-secondary mutual CCIs. Our results show that, when the received signals at the relays are weighted equally, the DF-XOR always outperforms both DF-superposition and AF relaying. In the last part of the thesis, we consider a limited feedback system model by assuming partial channel state information (CSI) of the interference channel between the secondary relays and primary receiver. In particular, the CSI feedback is limited only to the quantized channel direction information (CDI). To investigate the effect of the quantized CDI on the secondary system's performance, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the BER considering the mutual secondary-primary CCI. In the simulation results, we compare the system performance of the limited feedback with the perfect CSI. Our results show that the performance improves as the number of feedback bits increases

Outage Analysis for SWIPT-Enabled Two-Way Cognitive Cooperative Communications

In this paper, we study a cooperative cognitive radio network (CCRN) where the secondary user-transmitter (SU-Tx) assists bi-directional communication between a pair of primary users (PUs) following the principle of two-way relaying. In return, it gets access to the spectrum of the PUs to enable its own transmission to SU-receiver (SU-Rx). Further, in order to support sustainable operation of the network, SU-Tx is assumed to harvest energy from the RF signals received from the PUs, using the technique of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). Assuming a decode-and-forward behaviour and power-splitting based relaying protocol at SU-Tx, closed form expressions for outage probability of PU and SU are obtained. Simulation results validate our analytical results and illustrate spectrum-efficiency and energy-efficiency advantages of the proposed system over one-way relaying.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Outage Analysis for SWIPT-Enabled Two-Way Cognitive Cooperative Communications

In this paper, we study a cooperative cognitive radio network (CCRN) where the secondary user-transmitter (SU-Tx) assists bi-directional communication between a pair of primary users (PUs) following the principle of two-way relaying. In return, it gets access to the spectrum of the PUs to enable its own transmission to SU-receiver (SU-Rx). Further, in order to support sustainable operation of the network, SU-Tx is assumed to harvest energy from the RF signals received from the PUs, using the technique of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). Assuming a decode-and-forward behaviour and power-splitting based relaying protocol at SU-Tx, closed form expressions for outage probability of PU and SU are obtained. Simulation results validate our analytical results and illustrate spectrum-efficiency and energy-efficiency advantages of the proposed system over one-way relaying.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Power Allocation and Cooperative Diversity in Two-Way Non-Regenerative Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a dual-hop block fading cognitive radio network with underlay spectrum sharing over independent but not necessarily identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) Nakagami-$m$ fading channels. The primary network consists of a source and a destination. Depending on whether the secondary network which consists of two source nodes have a single relay for cooperation or multiple relays thereby employs opportunistic relay selection for cooperation and whether the two source nodes suffer from the primary users' (PU) interference, two cases are considered in this paper, which are referred to as Scenario (a) and Scenario (b), respectively. For the considered underlay spectrum sharing, the transmit power constraint of the proposed system is adjusted by interference limit on the primary network and the interference imposed by primary user (PU). The developed new analysis obtains new analytical results for the outage capacity (OC) and average symbol error probability (ASEP). In particular, for Scenario (a), tight lower bounds on the OC and ASEP of the secondary network are derived in closed-form. In addition, a closed from expression for the end-to-end OC of Scenario (a) is achieved. With regards to Scenario (b), a tight lower bound on the OC of the secondary network is derived in closed-form. All analytical results are corroborated using Monte Carlo simulation method