Cognitive Networks Achieve Throughput Scaling of a Homogeneous Network

Two distinct, but overlapping, networks that operate at the same time, space, and frequency is considered. The first network consists of n randomly distributed primary users, which form an ad hoc network. The second network again consists of m randomly distributed ad hoc secondary users or cognitive users. The primary users have priority access to the spectrum and do not need to change their communication protocol in the presence of the secondary users. The secondary users, however, need to adjust their protocol based on knowledge about the locations of the primary users to bring little loss to the primary network's throughput. By introducing preservation regions around primary receivers, a modified multihop routing protocol is proposed for the cognitive users. Assuming m = n β with β >; 1, it is shown that the secondary network achieves almost the same throughput scaling law as a stand-alone network while the primary network throughput is subject to only a vanishingly small fractional loss. Specifically, the primary network achieves the sum throughput of order n 1/2 and, for any δ >; 0, the secondary network achieves the sum throughput of order m 1/2-δ with an arbitrarily small fraction of outage. Thus, almost all secondary source-destination pairs can communicate at a rate of order m -1/2-δ .