  We investigate a cognitive radio network in which a primary user (PU) may
cooperate with a cognitive radio user (i.e., a secondary user (SU)) for
transmissions of its data packets. The PU is assumed to be a buffered node
operating in a time-slotted fashion where the time is partitioned into
equal-length slots. We develop two schemes which involve cooperation between
primary and secondary users. To satisfy certain quality of service (QoS)
requirements, users share time slot duration and channel frequency bandwidth.
Moreover, the SU may leverage the primary feedback message to further increase
both its data rate and satisfy the PU QoS requirements. The proposed
cooperative schemes are designed such that the SU data rate is maximized under
the constraint that the PU average queueing delay is maintained less than the
average queueing delay in case of non-cooperative PU. In addition, the proposed
schemes guarantee the stability of the PU queue and maintain the average energy
emitted by the SU below a certain value. The proposed schemes also provide more
robust and potentially continuous service for SUs compared to the conventional
practice in cognitive networks where SUs transmit in the spectrum holes and
silence sessions of the PUs. We include primary source burstiness, sensing
errors, and feedback decoding errors to the analysis of our proposed
cooperative schemes. The optimization problems are solved offline and require a
simple 2-dimensional grid-based search over the optimization variables.
Numerical results show the beneficial gains of the cooperative schemes in terms
of SU data rate and PU throughput, average PU queueing delay, and average PU
energy savings.
