Abstract
In this paper, we investigate a cognitive radio (CR) relay network with multiple relay nodes that help forwarding the signal of CR users. Best relay selection is considered to take advantage of its low complexity of implementation. When the primary user (PU) is located close to the relay nodes, the performance of the secondary network is severely degraded due to the interference power constraint during the transmission in the second hop. We propose a decode and zero-forcing forward scheme to suppress the interference power at the relay nodes and analyze the statistics of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio when the relay nodes are located arbitrarily and experience therefore non-identical Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results validate our theoretical results and show that our proposed scheme improves the performance of the CR network when the PU is close to the relay nodes.