Abstract
In a cognitive-relay system, the secondary user is permitted to transmit data via a relay when the spectrum bands are detected to be free. The miss detection of spectrum sensing and the primary user traffic will affect the data transmission performance of the secondary user. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the status change of the primary user on the bit error rate (BER) of the adaptive transmission of the secondary user in a cognitive-relay system. Numerical results show that the primary user traffic can significantly degrade the BER of the secondary user transmission. © 2011 IEEE.