Weighted Sum Rate Maximization in OFDM Based Cooperative Cognitive Radios: A Joint Optimization Approach

Improving utilization of the radio spectrum is the main goal of Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN). Recent studies made use of cooperative relay technology in cognitive networks, to increase transmission diversity gain. In this paper we consider an OFDM based cooperative cognitive network with a pair of Source-Destination nodes as the primary user (PU), and a pair of Source-Destination nodes—which is assisted with a relay—as the secondary (cognitive) user (SU). Both primary and secondary users share a same spectrum. In a two hop transmission, the source transmits in the first hop, and the half-duplex relay decodes the message, re-encodes and forwards it to the destination in the second hop on a different subcarrier. The cognitive network obeys an underlay paradigm where the SU is allowed to transmit simultaneously with PU, while its power is limited such that the interference caused for PU does not exceed a defined temperature. Under this constraint, a joint subcarrier pairing and power allocation is proposed for SU to maximize its weighted sum rate. The problem is transformed to a convex optimization problem and solved in the dual domain. Then an algorithm to achieve feasible solutions is used based on the optimization results. Through extensive simulations, we compare the spectrum utilization of the proposed approach with the existing ones, and show that interestingly the proposed method improves the weighted sum rate of SU.