On the Capacity of a Class of MIMO Cognitive Radios

Cognitive radios have been studied recently as a means to utilize spectrum in a more efficient manner. This paper focuses on the fundamental limits of operation of a MIMO cognitive radio network with a single licensed user and a single cognitive user. The channel setting is equivalent to an interference channel with degraded message sets (with the cognitive user having access to the licensed user's message). An achievable region and an outer bound is derived for such a network setting. It is shown that under certain conditions, the achievable region is optimal for a portion of the capacity region that includes sum capacity.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, Accepted for publication in Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP) - Special Issue on Dynamic Spectrum Acces

State of the cognitive interference channel: a new unified inner bound

The capacity region of the interference channel in which one transmitter non-causally knows the message of the other, termed the cognitive interference channel, has remained open since its inception in 2005. A number of subtly differing achievable rate regions and outer bounds have been derived, some of which are tight under specific conditions. In this work we present a new unified inner bound for the discrete memoryless cognitive interference channel. We show explicitly how it encompasses all known discrete memoryless achievable rate regions as special cases. The presented achievable region was recently used in deriving the capacity region of the general deterministic cognitive interference channel, and thus also the linear high-SNR deterministic approximation of the Gaussian cognitive interference channel. The high-SNR deterministic approximation was then used to obtain the capacity of the Gaussian cognitive interference channel to within 1.87 bits.Comment: Presented at the 2010 International Zurich Seminar on Communications - an 2nd updated version

Difference Antenna Selection and Power Allocation for Wireless Cognitive Systems

In this paper, we propose an antenna selection method in a wireless cognitive radio (CR) system, namely difference selection, whereby a single transmit antenna is selected at the secondary transmitter out of $M$ possible antennas such that the weighted difference between the channel gains of the data link and the interference link is maximized. We analyze mutual information and outage probability of the secondary transmission in a CR system with difference antenna selection, and propose a method of optimizing these performance metrics of the secondary data link subject to practical constraints on the peak secondary transmit power and the average interference power as seen by the primary receiver. The optimization is performed over two parameters: the peak secondary transmit power and the difference selection weight $\delta\in [0, 1]$. We show that, difference selection using the optimized parameters determined by the proposed method can be, in many cases of interest, superior to a so called ratio selection method disclosed in the literature, although ratio selection has been shown to be optimal, when impractically, the secondary transmission power constraint is not applied. We address the effects that the constraints have on mutual information and outage probability, and discuss the practical implications of the results.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, to be submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication