Cooperative relaying in underlay cognitive systems with hardware impairments

The performance of an underlay cognitive (secondary) dual-hop relaying system with multiple antennas and hardware impairments at each transceiver is investigated. In particular, the outage probability of the end-to-end (e2e) communication is derived in closed-form, when either transmit antenna selection with maximum ratio combining (TAS/MRC), or TAS with selection combining (TAS/SC) is established in each hop. Simplified asymptotic outage expressions are also obtained, which manifest the diversity and array order of the system, the effectiveness of the balance on the number of transmit/receive antennas, and the impact of hardware impairments to the e2e communication.