Uplink Relaying Scheme for Efficient Frequency Usage in Cognitive Radio Networks

While most of the public radio spectrum bands are allocated to licensed users, cognitive radio has been considered as a promising technology for the efficient spectrum utilization. In this new technology, secondary users opportunistically use the temporally underutilized licensed bands as long as they do not give the harmful interference to primary users. In this paper, we focus on the infra-structured network condition in which the cognitive radio network consists of a cognitive radio base station and multiple secondary users. Upon detecting a primary user, the entire cognitive radio network generally switches to another available channel, even if most of the on-going communications still does not interfere with the primary user. Moreover, the network re-entry process on a new channel causes the service disruption of the on-going communications. For this reason, in this paper, we propose a relaying scheme for efficient frequency usage, in which the secondary user out of the interference range of a primary user performs as a relaying node for the secondary user possibly interfering with a primary user. The entire spectrum switching is not required, and thus, we can avoid the service disruption of the on-going communications as much as possible.