Outage performance of cognitive AF relay networks with direct link and heterogeneous non‐identical constraints

Abstract

AbstractAlthough there have been many interesting works on outage performance analysis of cognitive AF relay networks, we have not found works taking into consideration all the following issues: multiple primary users (PUs), the existence of the direct link from secondary user (SU) source to SU destination, non‐identical, independent Rayleigh‐fading channels, non‐identical interference power limits of PUs, and non‐identical noise powers in signals. Additionally, in outage performance analysis for such networks, the correlation issue, which results from the channel gain of interference links from the SU nodes to the PU, requires elaborate treatments. Hence, analyzing outage performance of non‐identical‐parameter networks (where all channels are fully non‐identical Rayleigh‐fading channels, the PUs have different interference power limits, and received signals have different noise powers) from the beginning is highly complicated. To overcome this problem, we conduct the analysis in two steps. In the first step, expressions of both exact and asymptotic outage probability of identical‐parameter cognitive AF relay networks (where all channels are fully non‐identical Rayleigh‐fading channels but all other parameters are identical) are obtained. Then in the second step, we propose a method for transforming a network with all non‐identical parameters into a new identical‐parameter network, meanwhile guaranteeing that outage performance of the two networks before and after the transformation are the same. Hence, OP of the original non‐identical‐parameter network can be obtained indirectly by using the analysis results obtained in the first step. Our analysis results are validated through numerical simulations. The effects of the number of PUs and the diversity level of channel parameters (which means the range of the channel parameter values) are also inspected by simulations. The results show that taking these factors into consideration is of key importance in obtaining a more accurate estimation of outage performance of such networks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.