Efficient spectral access in distributed cooperative cognitive radio networks

The cognitive users (CUs) in the cooperative communication may serve as relay nodes for conveying the signal received from the primary users (PUs) to their destinations, provided that both the PUs and the CUs minimum rate requirements are satisfied. The PUs are motivated to cooperate by the incentive of achieving a higher PU rate with reduced power requirement, while concurrently allowing an access to CUs to share their spectral band. The existing cooperative schemes do not improve the simultaneous transmission rate of both PUs and CUs. In this paper, an incremental pragmatic distribution algorithm (IPDA) is proposed, which provides efficient spectral access with an improved simultaneous transmission performance of both CUs and PUs. The obtained results by employing the proposed algorithm show that our scheme offers relatively better performance of PUs and CUs with low overhead than the conventional distributed cooperative communication schemes.