Point-to-Point Communication of Cognitive Radios via Underlay Spectrum Sharing

Cognitive radios are typically known to exploit vacant spectrum resources in order not to interfere with primary communication systems. However, cognitive radios may not be able to secure a clear spectrum band in a bustling spectrum band. Underlay spectrum sharing provides a way to cope with such a spectrum sharing problem. Cognitive radios share the same spectrum band with the spectrum licensees, i.e., primary users, by adjusting signal transmission power so as not to severely deteriorate the performance of the primary users. We propose an underlay spectrum sharing policy leveraging uplink spectrum resource to be used in a cellular network. A pair of end terminals attempts to establish a direct point-to-point link, and perform as cognitive radios in the sense that they share the uplink radio resource of other primary users. We formulate the transmit power constraints of the cognitive radios and propose a practical uplink band sharing framework. Our simulation results demonstrate that such an uplink sharing underlay direct link can enhance the throughput performance of point-to-point link with low overhead.