An Adaptive Transmission Scheme for Cognitive Decode-and-Forward Relaying Networks: Half Duplex, Full Duplex, or No Cooperation

We propose an adaptive transmission scheme for cognitive decode-and-forward relaying networks, whereby, before each communication process, one out of three transmission modes is dynamically selected in order to maximize the instantaneous capacity of the system, namely, half-duplex (HD) relaying, full-duplex (FD) relaying, or direct transmission with no cooperation. The following key issues, relevant to underlay spectrum sharing and cooperative relaying, are considered: 1) the overall transmit power at the secondary network is constrained by both the maximum tolerable interference at the primary receiver and the maximum transmit power available at the secondary nodes; 2) under FD operation, the secondary relay is subject to residual self-interference, which is modeled as a fading channel; and 3) the signals coming from the secondary source and relay are handled at the secondary destination via maximal-ratio combining, in the HD relaying mode, and via a joint-decoding technique, in the FD relaying mode. We derive an exact analytical expression for the outage probability of the proposed scheme. Then, an approximate closed-form expression is proposed, and a corresponding asymptotic expression is derived. Monte Carlo simulations are run to validate the accuracy of the presented mathematical analysis and to showcase the tightness of the proposed approximation.