Underlay cooperative cognitive networks with imperfect Nakagami-m fading channel information and strict transmit power constraint: Interference statistics and outage probability analysis

This work investigates two important performance metrics of underlay cooperative cognitive radio (CR) networks: Interference cumulative distribution function of licensed users and outage probability of unlicensed users. These metrics are thoroughly analyzed in realistic operating conditions such as imperfect fading channel information and strict transmit power constraint, which satisfies interference power constraint and maximum transmit power constraint, over Nakagami-m fading channels. Novel closed-form expressions are derived and subsequently validated extensively through comparisons with respective results from computer simulations. The proposed expressions are rather long but straightforward to handle both analytically and numerically since they are expressed in terms of well known built-in functions. In addition, the offered results provide the following technical insights: i) Channel information imperfection degrades considerably the performance of both unlicensed network in terms of OP and licensed network in terms of interference levels; ii) underlay cooperative CR networks experience the outage saturation phenomenon; iii) the probability that the interference power constraint is satisfied is relatively low and depends significantly on the corresponding fading severity conditions as well as the channel estimation quality; iv) there exists a critical performance trade-off between unlicensed and licensed networks.