Abstract
The high hardware cost associated with multiple antennas at the secondary transmitter of an underlay cognitive radio (CR) can be reduced by antenna selection. This paper analyzes different power adaptive transmit antenna selection (TAS) schemes for an underlay CR, which ensure that the instantaneous interference caused by the secondary transmitter to the primary receiver is below a predetermined level. We consider the optimal continuous power adaptive TAS and present a low-complexity antenna and power level selection scheme, named sequential antenna and power level selection scheme (SAPS), for discrete power adaptation. Exact statistical characterizations of the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio at the secondary receiver are derived for the considered schemes. Based on the newly derived statistics, we prove that the considered schemes achieve the highest diversity order equaling the number of antennas at the secondary transmitter. Further, we also derive a closed-form expression of the ergodic capacity for the underlay CR with SAPS scheme. Finally, we show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing schemes in terms of ergodic capacity.