A Spectrum-Shaping Perspective on Cognitive Radio

TL;DR

This paper introduces a spectrum-shaping approach for cognitive radio that exploits unused channel margins, enabling coexistence with legacy services without sharing messages and allowing full power transmission.

Contribution

It presents a novel spectrum-shaping method that optimizes cognitive transmission to coexist with legacy systems without message sharing, challenging traditional interference constraints.

Findings

Cognitive systems can coexist without message sharing.

Full device power can be used by cognitive transmitters.

Analytical and numerical results demonstrate the approach's effectiveness.

Abstract

A new perspective on cognitive radio is presented, where the pre-existent legacy service is either uncoded or coded and a pair of cognitive transceivers need be appropriately deployed to coexist with the legacy service. The basic idea underlying the new perspective is to exploit the fact that, typically, the legacy channel is not fully loaded by the legacy service, thus leaving a non-negligible margin to accommodate the cognitive transmission. The exploitation of such a load margin is optimized by shaping the spectrum of the transmitted cognitive signal. It is shown that non-trivial coexistence of legacy and cognitive systems is possible even without sharing the legacy message with the cognitive transmitter. Surprisingly, the optimized cognitive transmitter is no longer limited by its interference power at the legacy receiver, and can always transmit at its full available device power. Analytical development and numerical illustration are presented, in particular focusing on the logarithmic growth rate, {\it i.e.}, the prelog coefficient, of cognitive transmission in the high-power regime.