On Throughput Region for Primary and Secondary Networks With Node-Level Cooperation

Cooperation has become an essential element in spectrum sharing between the primary and secondary networks. A new trend in cooperation is to allow the primary and secondary networks to cooperate on the node level for data forwarding. This new paradigm allows to pool network resources from both the primary and secondary networks and allows users in each network to access a much richer network infrastructure in a combined network. This paper offers an in-depth study of such node-level cooperation by explaining its optimal throughput curve-the maximum achievable throughput for both the primary and secondary users. We formulate the problem as a multicriteria optimization problem with the goal of maximizing the throughput of both the primary and secondary users. Through a novel approach based on weighted Chebyshev norm, we transform the multicriteria optimization problem into a single criteria optimization problem and find a sequence of Paretooptimal points iteratively. Based on the Pareto-optimal points, we construct the throughput curve and show that it provides an ε-approximation to the optimal curve. We prove some important properties of the optimal throughput curve. Through a case study, we show that the throughput region (the area under the throughput curve) under node-level cooperation is substantially larger than that when there is no node-level cooperation.