Bidirectional AF Relaying With Underlay Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper investigates the impact of primary transmissions on the performance of a dual-hop bidirectional cognitive radio system. The secondary users (SUs) communicate with each other in an underlay mode with the assistance of amplify-and-forward (AF) relays in the presence of primary users (PUs). Depending on whether there exists interference at the secondary transceivers, originating from the primary transmissions, or there is a possibility of employing the best relay selection technique at the secondary side, two operating cases are considered for the secondary network (SN). For both cases, tight lower bounds on the outage probability (OP) and the average symbol error probability (SEP) are derived in closed form. Moreover, a novel and general closed-form expression for the bit error rate (BER) of M-ary square quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) for both single- and multiple-relay systems, under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) when Gray coded bit mapping is employed, is presented. In addition, we provide an upper bound and closed-form approximate expression for the ergodic capacity (EC). Numerical results provide important insights into the impact of system parameters on performance; for instance, it is demonstrated that, in both cases, under consideration of power constraints on the secondary nodes as dictated by the underlay mode of operation, the SN always achieves the full diversity order similar to the noncognitive counterpart.