Modeling and Analysis of Cooperative Relaying in Spectrum-Sharing Cellular Systems

In this paper, spectrum-sharing technology is integrated into cellular systems to improve spectrum efficiency. Macrocell users are primary users (PUs) while those within local cells, e.g., femtocell users, or desiring cost-effective services, e.g., roamers, are identified as secondary users (SUs). The SUs share the spectrum resources of the PUs in a underlay way, thus the transmit power of a secondary is strictly limited by the primary's tolerable interference power. Given such constraints, a cooperative relaying transmission between a SU and the macrocell base station (BS) is necessary. In order to guarantee the success of dual-hop relaying and avoid multi-hop relaying, a new cooperative paradigm is proposed, where an idle PU (instead of a secondary as assumed in general) in the vicinity of a target SU is chosen to serve as a relaying node, thanks to the fact that any PU can always transmit to the macrocell BS directly. Moreover, two-way relaying strategy is applied at the chosen relaying node so as to further improve the spectral efficiency. Our results demonstrate that the proposed system is particularly suitable for delay-tolerant wireless services with asymmetric downlink/uplink traffics, such as e-mail checking, web browsing, social networking and data streaming, which are the most popular applications for SUs in spectrum-sharing cellular networks.