Ergodic capacity for fading channels in cognitive radio networks

International audienceIn this paper, we consider a Cognitive Radio (CR) system where two type of users try to access to the primary spectrum : a primary user (PU) owning the spectrum license and a secondary user (SU) who does not own the spectrum license. However, the secondary communication is allowed to coexist with the primary communication as long as the interference caused by SU to PU is below a tolerable threshold. We study the optimization problem which maximizes the SU's achievable ergodic capacity under different types of power constraints and for different fading channel models. Our goal is to calculate the optimal power allocation strategies for these optimization problems. We show that modelling with Rayleigh fading for the channel between SU transmitter and PU receiver is an advantageous way to ameliorate the SU ergodic capacity. Furthermore, we consider four combinations of power constraints, since the interference power constraint and the transmit power constraint can be restricted by a peak or an average threshold. We also show that the SU ergodic capacity under average transmit power constraint and average interference power constraint outperforms the one with peak power constraints. In this case, we propose a novel decoupling method. Our method reduces the complexity of the initial problem and makes our initial problem easier to solve