Outage Analysis of Opportunistic Relay Selection in Underlay Cooperative Cognitive Networks Under General Operation Conditions

This paper investigates the impact of practical operation conditions such as channel information imperfection (CII), independent nonidentical (i.n.i) fading distributions, strict power constraints (i.e., peak transmit power constraint and primary outage constraint), and primary interference on outage performance of opportunistic relay selection (ORS) in underlay cooperative cognitive networks (UCCNs). Toward this end, the power of secondary transmitters is first established to meet strict power constraints and account for primary interference and CII. Then, exact closed-form outage probability expressions for the secondary destination employing the maximum ratio combining (MRC) and the selection combining (SC) are proposed to promptly evaluate the effect of these conditions and provide useful insights into performance limits. Numerous results illustrate significant system performance deterioration due to primary interference and CII, performance saturation phenomenon in the secondary network, performance compromise between the secondary network and the primary network, significant performance improvement with respect to the increase in the number of involved relays, a large gap between the lower outage bound (MRC's outage performance) and the upper outage bound (SC's outage performance), and the advantage of utilizing direct channel between the source and the destination.