  In this paper, we investigate the joint spectrum sensing and resource
allocation problem to maximize throughput capacity of an OFDM-based cognitive
radio link with a cognitive relay. By applying a cognitive relay that uses
decode and forward (D&F), we achieve more reliable communications, generating
less interference (by needing less transmit power) and more diversity gain. In
order to account for imperfections in spectrum sensing, the proposed schemes
jointly modify energy detector thresholds and allocates transmit powers to all
cognitive radio (CR) subcarriers, while simultaneously assigning subcarrier
pairs for secondary users (SU) and the cognitive relay. This problem is cast as
a constrained optimization problem with constraints on (1) interference
introduced by the SU and the cognitive relay to the PUs; (2) miss-detection and
false alarm probabilities and (3) subcarrier pairing for transmission on the SU
transmitter and the cognitive relay and (4) minimum Quality of Service (QoS)
for each CR subcarrier. We propose one optimal and two sub-optimal schemes all
of which are compared to other schemes in the literature. Simulation results
show that the proposed schemes achieve significantly higher throughput than
other schemes in the literature for different relay situations.
