Analysis of energy harvesting cognitive relay network with cooperative spectrum sensing

In this study, the authors investigate the performance of an energy harvesting cognitive cooperative multiple relays network with spectrum sensing, where secondary user accesses the licensed spectrum according to the spectrum sensing results. Particularly, if the spectrum hole is detected, the secondary nodes harvest energy from the ambient environment, otherwise, the secondary source and relays transmit with the energy collected from the primary signals. Taking the imperfect spectrum sensing results into account, exact closed-form expressions for the total outage probability and capacity of the secondary network are derived under the context of Rayleigh fading channels, where the proposed modified selective cooperative decode-and-forward relaying transmission schemes are adopted. Compared with the conventional cognitive relay network, the authors must undertake the correlations among the received signal-to-noise ratios or signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios caused by both the presence of primary user's interference and energy harvesting for the system understudy. It is shown that spectrum sensing phase and data transmission phase are mutual influence and mutual restraint.