On the capacity of the cognitive interference channel with a relay

Abstract

Interference forwarding has been shown to be beneficial in the interference channel with a relay as it enlarges the strong interference region, allowing the decoding of the interference at the receivers for larger ranges of the channel gains. In this work we demonstrate the benefit of adding a relay to the cognitive interference channel. We pay special attention to the effect of interference forwarding in this configuration. Two setups are presented. In the first, the interference forwarded by the relay is the primary user's signal, and in the second, this is the cognitive user's signal. We characterise the capacity regions of these two models in the case of strong interference. We show that as opposed to the first setup, in the second setup the capacity region is enlarged, compared to the capacity region of the cognitive interference channel, when the relay does not help the intended receiver.