Performance of multi-path and multi-hop underlay cognitive radio network with max-min path selection

In this paper, we consider a cooperative multi-hop cognitive radio network (CRN) where multiple isolated multi-hop paths are present between a secondary transmitter and a secondary receiver. The performance of the considered system is analyzed with max-min path selection scheme over Rayleigh fading channels. The max-min scheme selects a multi-hop path with the highest value of minimum signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs) of all the multi-hop paths. The exact outage probability of this system is derived by considering both peak power and peak interference constraints. Further, a tight lower bound of symbol-error-rate of the considered system is derived. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to corroborate the derived analytical expressions. It is demonstrated that increasing the number of parallel paths significantly improves the performance of multi-hop CRNs.