On the coexistence of primary and secondary users in spectrum-sharing broadcast channels

In this paper, we consider a broadcast channel in spectrum-sharing networks, where the base station schedules licensed primary users (PUs) and cognitive secondary users (SUs) simultaneously. Based on such a framework, we present a transmission strategy in the light of dirty paper coding. In order to promise the PUs' quality of service (QoS) in the broadcasting, the base station chooses codewords for the users by taking into account that the codewords pertaining to SUs can be pre-subtracted from those pertaining to PUs as if there were no interference from the secondary's data to the primary's data. For the purpose of performance evaluation, by taking capacity behavior and bit error rate (BER) as metrics, we study the achievable data rate regions for both types of users with the introduced design, and analyze the BER performance in corresponding systems implemented with hierarchical modulation. Numerical results substantiate that with flexible management of the spectrum resources, our proposed scheme provides more communication opportunities for SUs while maintaining PUs' QoS at an acceptable level. © 2013 IEEE.