Performance analysis of mixed amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward protocol in underlay cognitive networks

In this paper, we propose and evaluate outage performance of a mixed amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying protocol in underlay cognitive radio. Different from the conventional AF and DF protocols, in the proposed protocol, a secondary source attempts to transmit its signal to a secondary destination with help of two secondary relays. One secondary relay always operates in AF mode, while the remaining one always operates in DF mode. Moreover, we also propose a relay selection method, which relies on the decoding status at the DF relay. For performance evaluation and comparison, we derive the exact and approximate closed-form expressions of the outage probability for the proposed protocol over Rayleigh fading channel. Finally, we run Monte Carlo simulations to verify the derivations. Results presented that the proposed protocol obtains a diversity order of three and the outage performance of our scheme is between that of the conventional underlay DF protocol and that of the conventional underlay AF protocol.