Modeling and Bandwidth Allocation of Cognitive Relay Networks with Energy Harvesting Nodes

In this paper, we investigate an energy harvesting and relaying protocol in cognitive relay networks, where a primary transmitter scavenges energy from the nature sources and then employs the harvested energy to forward the primary signal. Depending on the intensity of the energy harvesting from nature, a secondary user dynamically acts as a relay node to assist the primary transmission or does not. When the energy is not enough powerful to support the direct transmission between two primary users, the secondary users share the spectrum by assisting the primary transmission. For the relaying scheme, both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols are investigated. We analytically obtain the exact transmission rates for both primary and secondary networks. The analytically optimal bandwidth allocation strategy is then derived to maximize the total sum rate of the proposed scheme. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance gain of the proposed scheme over the non-optimal scheme.