On the degrees of freedom of the cognitive broadcast channel

Abstract

Cognitive broadcast channel, where two multiantenna transmitters communicate with their respective receivers, is considered. One of the transmitters is said to be cognitive (secondary) as it is assumed to know the messages of the other (primary) transmitter non-causally. The goal is to design cooperative schemes between the two transmitters, which impose only minimal changes to the primary broadcast channel (compared to the non-cognitive scenario). Towards this end, an achievable scheme is provided under which both intra cell and inter cell interferences at the primary receivers are aligned. The interference at the secondary receivers, on the other hand, is canceled by dirty paper coding. The corresponding achievable region and an outer bound region are provided in terms of the degrees of freedom (DoF) metric. Special cases shows the optimality of the proposed scheme in the high SNR regime for those cases. We also illustrate the advantage of the cognitive cooperation over the non-cognitive system by proving that the achieved sum DoF is strictly larger than the non-cognitive case. 2011 IEEE.