Cooperative AF Relaying in Spectrum-Sharing Systems: Performance Analysis under Average Interference Power Constraints and Nakagami-m Fading

Since the electromagnetic spectrum resource becomes more and more scarce, improving spectral efficiency is extremely important for the sustainable development of wireless communication systems and services. Integrating cooperative relaying techniques into spectrum-sharing cognitive radio systems sheds new light on higher spectral efficiency. In this paper, we analyze the end-to-end performance of cooperative amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying in spectrum-sharing systems. In order to achieve the optimal end-to-end performance, the transmit powers of the secondary source and the relays are optimized with respect to average interference power constraints at primary users and Nakagami-$m$ fading parameters of interference channels (for mathematical tractability, the desired channels from secondary source to relay and from relay to secondary destination are assumed to be subject to Rayleigh fading). Also, both partial and opportunistic relay-selection strategies are exploited to further enhance system performance. Based on the exact distribution functions of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) obtained herein, the outage probability, average symbol error probability, diversity order, and ergodic capacity of the system under study are analytically investigated. Our results show that system performance is dominated by the resource constraints and it improves slowly with increasing average SNR. Furthermore, larger Nakagami-m fading parameter on interference channels deteriorates system performance slightly. On the other hand, when interference power constraints are stringent, opportunistic relay selection can be exploited to improve system performance significantly. All analytical results are corroborated by simulation results and they are shown to be efficient tools for exact evaluation of system performance.