A BER Based Selection Combining Protocol for Adaptive Cooperative Cognitive Radios

This paper illustrates the performance of bit error rate based selection combining (BER-SC) protocol for adaptive cooperative cognitive radios. In the proposed framework, the unlicensed (i.e. secondary) system utilizes an adaptive mode of transmission to help the licensed (i.e. primary) system to achieve the desired quality of service in exchange for opportunistic spectrum access. The total transmission is divided in two phases. In Phase I, the primary transmitter (PT) broadcasts the data to the primary receiver (PR), which is overheard by the secondary transmitter (ST) and secondary receiver (SR). In Phase II, ST decodes the primary data and linearly combines its own data with the primary data. Using M-QAM the combined data is adaptively modulated, where M = 4, 16 or 64 depending on the received channel feedback, and relayed to PR and SR. At PR, BER-SC is employed to retrieve the primary data, and at SR interference cancellation is used to retrieve the secondary data. The analytical expressions are derived for the BER and the outage probability. The obtained results demonstrate the higher performance gains for both primary and secondary system by using adaptive mode of transmission at ST and BER-SC at PR.