Abstract
This study investigates the interference alignment techniques for cognitive radio networks toward 5G to meet the demand and challenges for future wireless communications requirements. In this context, we examine the performance of the interference alignment in two parts. In the first part of this chapter, a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) cognitive radio network in the presence of multiple secondary users (SUs) is investigated. The proposed model assumes that linear interference alignment is used at the primary system to lessen the interference between primary and secondary networks. Herein, we derive the closed-form mathematical equations for the outage probability considering the interference leakage occurred in the primary system. The second part of this study analyzes the performance of interference alignment for underlay cognitive two-way relay networks with channel state information (CSI) quantization error. Here, a two-way amplify-and-forward relaying scheme is considered for independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channel. The closed-form average pairwise error probability expressions are derived, and the effect of CSI quantization error is analyzed based on the bit error rate performance. Finally, we evaluate the instantaneous capacity for both primary and secondary networks*.
Keywords
- 5G wireless communication systems
- average pairwise error probability
- CSI quantization
- cognitive radio networks
- interference alignment
- MIMO
- outage probability performance
- two-way amplify-and-forward relaying
1. Introduction
The rapidly growing number of mobile devices, higher data rates and cellular traffic, and quality of service requirements trigger the development of mobile communications. It is expected that the next-generation cellular networks (5G and beyond) will meet the advanced technology requirements. 4G networks are not powerful enough to support massively connected devices with low latency and high spectral efficiency, which is critical for next-generation networks. 5G networks are characterized by three fundamental functions in general: connectivity for everywhere, low latency for communication, and very high-speed data transmission [1].
In the near future, a large number of mobile devices will connect to one another in everywhere and provide a seamless mobile user experience. Real-time applications and critical systems and services (medical applications, traffic flow, etc.) with zero latency are expected to be offered over 5G cellular networks. Besides, the fast data transmission and reception will be ensured by supporting zero latency using a high-speed link. For this reason, the scope of 5G cellular networks bring the emerging advantages, new architectures, methodologies, and technologies on telecommunications such as energy-efficient heterogeneous networks, software-defined networks (SDN), full-duplex radio communications, device-to-device (D2D) communications, and cognitive radio (CR) networks. An increasing number of mobile devices and the bandwidth requirement for large amounts of data require the development of the new technologies and infrastructures in addition to the existing technology. It is inevitable that the number of smart phones, high-definition televisions, cameras, computers, transport systems, video surveillance systems, robots, sensors, and wearable devices produces a huge amount of voice-data traffic in the near future. To meet the growth and to provide fast and ubiquitous Internet access, several promising technologies have been developed. Regarding the deployment of the 5G wireless communication systems, the corresponding growth in the demand for wireless radio spectrum resources will appear. The capacity of the communication networks will be increased by using the energy-efficiency techniques with the evolving technology in 5G networks [2, 3, 4, 5].
One of the candidates for solving the problem of spectrum shortage is the CR network which will be a key technology for 5G networks. CR has attracted considerable interest as it can cope with the spectrum underutilization phenomenon. Performing spectrum sharing using a CR network is an important issue in wireless communication networks. There are three main ways for a primary network user to share the frequency spectrum with a cognitive user: underlay, overlay, and interweave. In the underlay method, the secondary user (SU) transmits its information simultaneously with the primary user (PU) as long as the interference between SU and PU receivers is within a predefined threshold. In the overlay approach, SU helps PU by sharing its resources, and in return, PU allows SU to communicate. In the interweave technique, SU can use the bandwidth of PU if PU is not active. In this model, SU should have perfect spectrum-sensing features to analyze the spectrum [6, 7, 8, 9].
Among the various methods of solving the interference problem, interference alignment (IA) is one of the most promising ways to achieve it. IA is an important approach for CR to recover the desired signal by utilizing the precoding and linear suppression matrices which consolidates the interference beam into one subspace in order to eliminate it [10, 11, 12, 13]. In the literature, linear IA is adopted in CR interference channels in [14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20] and the references therein. In [14], adaptive power allocation schemes are considered for linear IA-based CR networks where the outage probability and sum rate were derived. In [15], adaptive power allocation was studied for linear IA-based CR using antenna selection at the receiver side. Ref. [16] enhances the security of CR networks by using a zero-forcing precoder. Moreover, in [17], a similar work was proposed to improve the overall outage performance of the interference channel by using power allocation optimization. These studies have shown that interference management is a critical issue to be handled in all multiuser wireless networks.
CR technology can be capable of utilizing the spectrum efficiently as long as the interference between PU and SU is perfectly aligned as shown in Figure 1. A set of studies discussing IA is presented in the literature [21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29].

Figure 1.
Illustration of the primary link between PU pair and interference links generated by the SUs.
Motivated by the above works, in the first part of this study, we examine the impact of interference leakage on multi-input multi-output (MIMO) CR networks with multiple SUs. Specifically, a closed-form outage probability expression is derived to provide the performance of the primary system. Then, in the second part of our work, we investigate the performance of IA in underlay CR networks for Rayleigh fading channel. Moreover, unlike the mentioned papers, the effect of CSI quantization error is taken into account in our analysis. Then, a two-way relaying scheme with amplify-and-forward (AF) strategy is studied. Finally, the effects of the relay location and the path loss exponent on the BER performance and system capacity and CSI quantization on the average pairwise error probability (PEP) performance for this two-way AF system are presented.
The main simulation parameters and their descriptions used in this study are summarized in Table 1.
Symbol | Description |
---|---|
Transmitted powers of the PU and SU | |
Variance of the circularly symmetric additive white Gaussian noise vector | |
Data rate threshold | |
Interference-leakage parameter | |
Number of transmit-and-receive antennas of PU | |
Number of transmit-and-receive antennas of SU | |
Number of SU | |
Distance between the | |
Path loss exponent between the | |
Channel state information exchange amount between the |
Table 1.
The simulation symbols and their descriptions.
2. The impact of interference leakage on MIMO CR networks
In this study, MIMO interference alignment-based CR network with a PU and multiple SUs is considered under Rayleigh fading channel.
2.1. System model
In the system model as it is shown in Figure 2, the number of transmit-and-receive antennas of the PU is given by
where

Figure 2.
IA-based CR network with single PU and K SUs sharing the spectrum.
The following conditions must be satisfied for perfect interference alignment between PU and SUs:
Each user transmits
2.2. Outage probability analysis
The channel capacity and outage probability are the most important impairments which affect the quality of service (QoS) in wireless communication systems. When no CSI conditions are given, MIMO channel capacity is expressed as in [31]. The channel capacity of the considered MIMO system in PU can be expressed as
where
where
In the presence of interference, the primary system works in MIMO fashion, and leakages may occur due to fast-fading Rayleigh channel. To improve the performance of the primary system, we adopt maximum ratio transmission and maximum ratio combining at the transmitter and receiver, respectively. Thereby, the end-to-end signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the primary system can be written as
In addition, the PDF of
where
By substituting (8) and (9) into (10), then with the help of [32, Eq. 3.351.3] and after few manipulations, PDF expression of
Furthermore, collecting constant terms in (11),
Hereby,
To achieve the closed-form expression of (11), binomial expression of
where
Outage probability function of the proposed MIMO system with respect to
The closed-form expression for (16) can be validated with the numerical integral operation [33].
2.3. Performance evaluation
Herein, the system performance of the MIMO CR network is studied in the presence of interference leakage for Rayleigh fading channel by comparing the analytical results with computer simulations. We assumed
In Figure 3, the

Figure 3.
Pout performance for different data rate threshold Rth.
In Figure 4, the impact of the leakage coefficient,

Figure 4.
Pout performance with varying SNR for different interference-leakage values.
In Figure 5,

Figure 5.
Pout vs. SNR for different numbers of SUs.
In Figure 6, the impact of antenna diversity on the

Figure 6.
The effect of antenna diversity on the outage probability performance.
3. The effect of CSI quantization on interference alignment in CR networks
In this section, we investigate a cognitive two-way relaying network composed of a primary network (PN) with one pair of PU and a secondary network (SN) with two source terminals and a relay terminal (
3.1. System model
We consider a MIMO interference network shown in Figure 7, where the transmitter,
where

Figure 7.
System model for interference alignment-based cognitive two-way relay network with primary network and secondary network.
The effective additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) term with zero mean and unit variance,
where
In the first phase of the transmission (multiple-access phase) in SN, both
where
Here,
where
where
where
3.2. Performance analysis
This section starts by the instantaneous capacity analysis of the proposed system with interference alignment in underlay cognitive two-way relay networks with CSI quantization. We then study the BER and average PEP performance.
The capacity is expressed as the expected value of the mutual information between the transmitting terminal and receiving one. In light of this fact, we consider the method developed in [29]; the instantaneous capacity in PN can be expressed as
where
Average BER for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation can be expressed as
where
Average pairwise error probability (
Finally, this integral can be evaluated with the help of Mathematica and average PEP under Rayleigh fading channel can be derived in a closed form as follows:
3.3. Numerical results
In this section the numerical results are provided with various scenarios to evaluate the performance analysis for IA in underlay cognitive two-way relay networks with CSI quantization. BER performance for direct transmission links of the proposed system is illustrated in Figure 8 over Rayleigh distribution for different amounts of CSI exchange with varying SNR. For convenience, we set

Figure 8.
BER performance for different amounts of CSI exchange with varying SNR.
In Figure 9, the average PEP versus SNR is plotted for

Figure 9.
Average PEP performance for different amounts of CSI exchange with varying SNR over Rayleigh fading channel in primary network.
Figure 10 examines the capacity analysis with perfect and imperfect CSI for different direct links in PN and SN. The results clearly show that, examining the capacity with perfect CSI, performance improvement becomes larger as the SNR increases.

Figure 10.
Capacity vs. SNR of the primary network and secondary network nodes under different CSI scenarios.
Figure 11 demonstrates the effects of

Figure 11.
BER performance for different amounts of CSI exchange and distances with varying SNR over Rayleigh fading channel for secondary network.
Figure 12 shows the capacity performance of PU in the underlay cognitive two-way relay network over Rayleigh fading channel with varying path loss exponent,

Figure 12.
Capacity changes with SNR for the environmental conditions having different path loss exponents.
4. Conclusion
In this chapter, the system performance of linear interference alignment on the MIMO CR network is investigated under interference leakage. To quantify the performance of the primary system under a certain level of interference leakage, the closed-form outage probability expression is derived for Rayleigh fading channel. In all analyses, the theoretical results closely match with the simulations which confirm the accuracy of the derived expressions.
In the second part of this work, considering a practical issue, we investigate the performance of interference alignment in underlay cognitive radio network with CSI quantization error over general MIMO interference channel. Amplify-and-forward scheme for two-way relay network under Rayleigh fading is considered. The impact of the CSI exchange amount, the distance between the
It would be interesting to study on various scenarios, including single-hop, multi-hop, and multi-way networks in future work to analyze the system performance over the recently developed interference alignment algorithms for next-generation 5G wireless communication systems.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to express their special thanks to Seda Ustunbas (Wireless Communication Research Laboratory, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey) for useful discussions of this chapter.
Notes
- The content of this study has partially been submitted in IEEE 41st International Conference on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (TSP 2018).