Outage probability analysis of a secondary user in an underlay dual hop cognitive amplify and forward relay network

SummaryThis paper presents the performance evaluation of a secondary user (SU) in an underlay cognitive dual-hop relaying system considering instantaneous as well as average channel information of the interfering links (from the secondary source and relay to the primary receiver) and the data link from the secondary source to relay, to calculate transmit power and amplifying gain of secondary system. Comparison of above mentioned cases is done for two different scenarios - with direct path and without direct path. We evaluate the performance considering two different diversity techniques namely as selection combining (SC) and maximum ratio combining (MRC). The effect of different fading channels (Rayleigh and Nakagami) on the outage performance of the SU for the two diversity techniques is also shown. The outage probability of the SU is reduced when the diversity techniques are used (with direct path) as compared to the outage probability of SU without direct path. We find that the outage performance is better for instantaneous channel information as compared to average channel information for the links. We observe that MRC provides better performance than SC. Furthermore, this work shows that the outage performance of the SU has been improved when the Nakagami fading channel (m = 2) is considered instead of Rayleigh fading channel.