Spectrum sharing on interference channels with a cognitive relay

In this paper, an interference channel with a cognitive relay (IFC-CR) is considered to achieve spectrum sharing between a licensed primary user and an unlicensed secondary user. The CR assists both users in relaying their messages to the respective receivers, under the constraint that the performance of the legacy primary user is not degraded. Without requiring any non-causal knowledge, the CR uses a successive interference cancellation to first decode the primary and secondary messages after a transmission phase. A power allocation is then performed to forward a linear weighted combination of the processed signals in the relaying phase. Closed-form expressions of the end-to-end outage probability are derived for both primary and secondary users under the proposed approach. Furthermore, by exploiting the decoded primary and secondary messages in the first phase, we propose the use of dirty paper coding (DPC) at CR to pre-cancel the interference seen at the secondary (or primary) receiver in the second phase, which results in a performance upper bound for the secondary (or primary) user without affecting the other user. Simulation results demonstrate that with a joint consideration of the power control at the secondary transmitter and the power allocation at CR, performance gains can be achieved for both primary and secondary users.