Statistically robust cooperative beamforming for cognitive radio networks

We consider a cognitive radio (CR) relay network consisting of a cognitive source, a cognitive destination and a number of cognitive relay nodes that share spectrum with a primary transmitter and receiver. Due to poor channel conditions, the cognitive source is unable to communicate directly with the cognitive destination and hence employs the cognitive relays for assistance. We assume that the CR has a very loose cooperation with the primary network and therefore, only partial channel state information is available. Under these assumptions, we propose a new statistically robust CR cooperative relay beamformer where either the total relay transmit power or the cognitive destination signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) is optimised subject to primary receiver outage probability constraint. We formulate the robust total relay power and the cognitive destination SINR optimisation problems as a convex second order cone program and a convex feasibility problem, respectively, that provide near optimum results. We also present efficient iterative algorithms that provide the optimum results.