Maximum throughput of a cooperative energy harvesting cognitive radio user

In this paper, we investigate the maximum throughput of a saturated rechargeable secondary user (SU) sharing the spectrum with a primary user (PU). The SU harvests energy packets (tokens) from the environment with a certain harvesting rate. All transmitters are assumed to have data buffers. In addition to its own traffic buffer, the SU has a buffer for storing the admitted primary packets for relaying; and a buffer for storing the energy tokens harvested from the environment. We propose a new cooperative cognitive relaying protocol that allows the SU to relay a fraction of the undelivered primary packets. We consider an interference channel model (or a multi-packet reception (MPR) channel model), where concurrent transmissions can survive with certain probability characterized by the complement of channel outages. The proposed protocol exploits the primary queue burstiness and receivers' MPR capability. In addition, it efficiently expends the secondary energy tokens. Our numerical results show the benefits of cooperation, receivers' MPR capability, and secondary energy queue arrival rate on the system performance from a network layer standpoint. © 2014 IEEE.