Overlay Cognitive Radios With Channel-Aware Adaptive Link Selection and Buffer-Aided Relaying

The aim of this work is to maximize the long-term average achievable rate region of a primary and a secondary source-destination pairs operating in an overlay setup over block-fading channels. To achieve this objective, we propose an opportunistic strategy to grant channel access to the primary and secondary sources based on the channel conditions in order to exploit the available multiple-link diversity gains in the system. The secondary source has causal knowledge of the primary messages and it acts as a relay of the primary source in return for getting access to the channel. To maximize the gains of relaying, the relay and destination are equipped with buffers to enable the use of channel-aware adaptive link selection. We propose and optimize different link selection policies and characterize their expected achievable rates. Also, we provide several numerical results to demonstrate the evident mutual benefits of buffer-aided cooperation and adaptive link selection to the primary and the secondary source-destination pairs. © 1972-2012 IEEE.