1556
10, OCTOBER 2015
Transceiver Optimization for Unicast/Multicast
MIMO Cognitive Overlay/Underlay Networks
Nikhil Gupta and Aditya K. Jagannatham
AbstractIn this work, we develop a majorization theory based
linear precoding framework for optimal transceiver design in
MIMO cognitive radio networks. Closed form expressions are
derived for the optimal MIMO precoders using two new trans-
ceiver design paradigms, the zero-forcing transceiver (ZFT) and
the interference optimized transceiver (IOT), for overlay and
underlay MIMO cognitive radio networks respectively. Further,
another novel contribution of this work is to derive the precoders
for multicast MIMO cognitive radio scenarios based on novel
multi-user mean-squared error (MSE) bounds. Simulation results
demonstrate the performance of the proposed optimal MIMO
transceivers.
Index TermsCognitive radio, MIMO, transceiver optimiza-
tion.
I. INTRODUCTION
C OGNITIVE radio has recently emerged as a popular new
paradigm towards relieving spectral congestion [1], [2]
by allowing secondary users to conditionally access spectral
bands licensed to primary users. Naturally, it is essential for
the secondary users to limit the interference caused to the pri-
mary wireless users. Several MIMO precoding techniques have
been developed to optimize the secondary transmission. Works
[3], [4], [5] present beamforming algorithms for cognitive radio
scenarios with single antenna users and do not focus on op-
timal precoders for general multi-antenna users. Further, the
proposed algorithms in [3], [4] are iterative in nature, while the
work in [5] does not present any closed form solution. Optimal
MIMO precoding schemes such as block diagonalization and
successive optimization [6], [7] have become signicantly pop-
ular. The authors in [8] have developed two schemes namely
the P-SVD and D-SVD for zero-forcing and interference con-
strained MIMO cognitive radio transmission respectively, while
the authors of [9] present a framework for secondary user rate
maximization subject to a primary user rate constraint. How-
ever, the above works are based on power allocation towards
sum rate maximization. Realization of the sum rate performance
requires a signicant additional complexity in terms of forward
error correction (FEC) at the transmitter and receiver, and there-
fore does not correlate well with the actual BER performance.
Manuscript received December 13, 2014; revised February 12, 2015;
accepted March 10, 2015. Date of publication March 18, 2015; date of current
version March 24, 2015. The associate editor coordinating the review of this
manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Francesco Verde.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian In-
stitute of Technology, Kanpur, UP 208016, India (e-mail: nikgupta@iitk.ac.in;
adityaj@iitk.ac.in).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LSP.2015.2413940
1070-9908 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO.
Thus, mean squared error (MSE) minimization, which has been
proposed in works such as [10], can be employed as a reliable
alternative approach for performance optimization in practical
cognitive radio scenarios. The work in [11] presents a frame-
work for MSE minimization in cognitive radio scenarios. How-
ever, the scheme presented therein is based on a iterative pro-
cedure which involves repeated matrix inversion and therefore
has a high computational complexity. In this context, a frame-
work for optimal MIMO transceiver design towards MSE min-
imization, based on majorization theory, has been presented in
[10] and offers an attractive solution for optimal precoder de-
sign. However, the work therein cannot be directly applied in the
context of interference constrained cognitive radio scenarios.
More importantly, the work therein is restricted to single user
unicast scenarios. Consequently, in this letter, we propose two
new MIMO transceiver design paradigms for cognitive radio
networks, i.e. the zero-forcing transceiver (ZFT) and the inter-
ference optimized transceiver (IOT), employing majorization
theory. Depending on the cognitive radio policy, one can either
choose ZFT when absolutely no secondary user interference is
allowed or IOT when a marginal level of interference can be
tolerated at the primary user. The proposed framework can be
employed for transceiver design in diverse cognitive radio sce-
narios such as overlay, where the secondary transmission causes
no interference to the primary user due to intelligent signal pro-
cessing and underlay, where a nominal interference level can
be tolerated at the primary user. A novel contribution of this
work is to present a comprehensive framework for zero-forcing
and interference threshold based transceiver design for MSE
minimization, whereas works such as [8], [12] consider only
sum-rate optimization. We consider a variety of design objec-
tives such as sum/product MSE minimization and the min-max
MSE criteria to derive closed form solutions for the optimal pre-
coders, which have a signicantly lower computational com-
plexity compared to the iterative schemes in works such as [11].
Further, for multicast scenarios arising in 3G/4G networks, pre-
coder design is challenging due to the simultaneous transmis-
sion to several users. In this context, we present novel precoder
design expressions based on various MSE bounds derived for
the sum, product and min-max MSE criteria.
II. OPTIMAL MIMO TRANSCEIVERS FOR UNICAST
COGNITIVE RADIO SCENARIOS
Consider a cognitive radio scenario with primary users, a
secondary transmitter and receiver. Let denote the number
of antennas at the th primary user, while , denote
the number of antennas at the secondary transmitter and re-
ceiver respectively. The secondary user channel matrix is de-
noted by , while the MIMO channel between
GUPTA AND JAGANNATHAM: UNICAST/MULTICAST MIMO COGNITIVE OVERLAY/UNDERLAY NETWORKS 1557

the secondary transmitter and the th primary user is denoted is given as , where denotes the diagonal
by . Thus, the received signal matrix with elements of vector along the
at the secondary receiver is given as, principal diagonal, and are given as,

and the interference at primary user from the secondary user is
given as where is the symbol vector trans-
mitted for the secondary user by the secondary transmitter and
denotes the precoding matrix for the secondary
user. The quantity represents the noise plus pri-
mary user interference at the secondary user, with covariance
.
A. Zero-Forcing Transceiver Design (ZFT)
We now begin with a description of the zero-forcing based op-
timal transceiver design scheme ZFT for MIMO cognitive radio
scenarios. The ZFT nulls the interference at the primary users,
while simultaneously minimizing the MSE of transmission of
the secondary user, thereby optimizing the secondary user per-
formance. Consider the concatenated primary user channel ma-
trix given as,
where above denotes the SVD of the matrix . There-
fore, denotes the null space of the concatenated primary user
channel matrix. Similar to works such as [8], [11], let
denote the noise-whitened effective channel ma-
trix of the secondary user and denote the precoding matrix.
The secondary precoder can be readily seen to null
the interference at each of the primary users. Consider now
the standard MIMO linear receiver given as,
where for the zero-forcing and MMSE receivers re-
spectively. Therefore, corresponding to the precoding matrix
and the MIMO receiver , the covariance matrix for the error
at the receiver can be seen to be given as,
(1)
where is the Lagrange multiplier such that and
if and 0 otherwise.
Proof: Similar to result in [10]. Follows from the fact that
the optimization objective is a Schur concave func-
tion. Therefore, the optimal zero forcing precoder which min-
imizes the sum MSE is given as where are
as given in (1) above.
Consider now the optimal ZFT which minimizes the product
MSE . This is a Schur-concave objective function and
the optimal ZFT precoder which minimizes the product MSE
above is given as , where . Fur-
ther, the optimal ZFT precoder which minimizes the maximum
MSE i.e. the optimization objective is given as
, where , and the matrix
is any unitary matrix which satises such as the
Hadamard matrix. It can be noted that the ZFT design is pos-
sible only when , which is a stringent con-
dition. The IOT design proposed next however does not require
the above condition to be met and is therefore more exible in
terms of practical implementation.
B. Interference Optimized Transceiver Design (IOT)
While the optimal ZFT described above completely cancels
the interference to the primary users, this can lead to a degra-
dation in the performance of the secondary user. However, in
scenarios where the primary users are capable of tolerating in-
terference below a pre-dened threshold, one can use the IOT
based optimal precoder design procedure described below, and
is signicantly different in nature from the work in papers such
as [12], [8] which consider only multiuser performance opti-
mization. Let the acceptable interference level be denoted by
. Let the SVD of , with denoting the
singular values. The net interference to the primary users corre-
sponding to the precoder is given as,

Let denote the th diagonal element of the covariance matrix (2)

above, i.e. corresponding to the mean squared error
for the th data stream. Further, let the total transmit power be
constrained as .
Let the SVD of be given as , where de- Theorem 1: The IOT criterion based optimal MIMO precoder
note the singular values. The result below now gives the op- which minimizes the sum MSE is given as the solution to the
timal MIMO ZFT for cognitive radio scenarios, which mini- optimization problem,
mizes the net MSE, which is more practical compared to the
sum-rate maximization approaches employed in works such as
[12], [8].
Lemma 1: The optimal ZFT precoder which minimizes the
sum MSE subject to the power constraint i.e. the solution to where . The optimal IOT precoder is ob-
the optimization problem tained as , where,

(3)
1558 IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2015

where denotes the Lagrange multiplier and is the th diag- Thus, where is the individual MSE
onal entry of the matrix . of the th decoded stream associated with the effective multi-
Proof: Since the objective function above is Schur con- cast group matrix . Let its eigenvalue de-
cave, the optimal precoder is given as . Sub- composition be given as , with denoting its
stituting this in the interference constraint in (2) above yields eigenvalues and . The optimal precoder which mini-
which is equivalent to the constraint mizes the sum MSE bound for this multicast scenario is given
. The optimization problem for the IOT based by the result below, and is signicantly different in nature from
precoder, which minimizes the sum MSE, can be recast as, the work in papers such as [12], [8] which consider only mul-
tiuser performance optimization.
Lemma 2: The optimal ZFT precoder which minimizes the
sum MSE bound i.e. the solution of the optimization problem

It can now be readily seen that the solution of the optimization

problem above is obtained by choosing as given in (3), with
the Lagrange multiplier chosen such that the constraint is sat-
ised.
Further, the optimal IOT precoders which minimize the
product and max MSE can now be obtained employing a
procedure similar to the one described for the ZFT precoder is given as , where , the th entry of is,
design above. With respect to complexity of implementation,
the ZFT has a complexity of to nd the null space
for the projection followed by for the secondary user
SVD where , while the
IOT interestingly only has a complexity of . This Proof: The proof now follows similar to the optimal pre-
compares favorably with schemes in works such as [8], which coder design for the unicast scenario by observing that the quan-
also employ SVD operations for precoder design. tity for the unicast scenario is now replaced by the effec-
tive channel matrix .
III. OPTIMAL MIMO PRECODER DESIGN FOR MULTICAST Similarly, the IOT based optimal precoder for the mul-
COGNITIVE RADIO SCENARIOS ticast MIMO scenario can now be obtained similar to
We now describe the procedure for optimal precoder design the unicast scenario. Set the effective channel matrix
for multicast MIMO cognitive radio scenarios for both the ZFT . The optimal pre-
and IOT based optimization criteria described above. Similar coder is given as , where is given as,
to the unicast scenario, let denote the precoder for the mul-
ticast secondary user group with users. We begin by con-
sidering the ZFT design scenario. Let the optimal precoder
be given as , similar to the unicast scenario. Also, let
denote the effective channel matrix of user
in this scenario, where is the noise plus interference co-
variance for the th user. Consider now the net MSE for the where is the th diagonal element of . However, the
multicast group given as, sum MSE minimization can potentially lead to disproportionate
secondary user power allocation. Therefore, similar to works
such as [13] and [14], one can consider product and max MSE
minimization towards more equitable performance optimization
in cognitive radio scenarios.
where . We now use the Jensens Further, a bound on the objective function for the product
trace inequality, , where MSE in the multicast scenario can be obtained as follows. The
function is convex and the matrices are symmetric. objective function in this case is given in the equation at the
Hence, a lower bound for the sum MSE above is given as, top of the page, where the equivalence of the objective func-
, which implies tions above is due to the fact that is a monotonic concave
function and the inequality in the last step above follows using
the Jensens inequality. The above relation for can be further
simplied as, using the convexity
GUPTA AND JAGANNATHAM: UNICAST/MULTICAST MIMO COGNITIVE OVERLAY/UNDERLAY NETWORKS
of together with the Jensens trace inequality for matrices.
Hence,
Thus, where denotes the determinant.
Therefore, the effective channel matrix can
now be employed to obtain the optimal ZFT multicast precoder
which minimizes the product MSE also, as ,
where is given as, . We now consider
the ZFT precoder design for minimizing the maximum MSE
in the multicast scenario. Let the objective function for this
optimization problem be given as,
It can now be shown that . As de-
scribed in [10], the optimal solution for occurs when all the
diagonal elements of the matrix are equal.
Therefore, the objective function can be transformed as
where the optimal precoders for
the optimization objectives and are related as
, where is a unitary matrix such that it has equal diag-
onal elements. Employing the Jensens trace inequality, it can
be seen that,
Thus, . It follows that the solution
to the optimization problem with the optimization objective
yields the optimal precoder which minimizes the above bound
on the maximum MSE of the multicast users. Therefore, the op-
timal precoder for this scenario is given as , CR-MMSE-BD, CR-ZF-BD schemes from [11]. It can be
, and the matrix is chosen similar to
the unicast scenario. We now present simulation results to il-
lustrate the performance of the above precoder designs for uni-
cast/ multicast cognitive radio scenarios. Further, in terms of
computational complexity, it is very interesting to note that the
overall complexity of precoding for the multicast scenario is
, and does not increase with the number of users.
This is possible due to the novel MSE bounds for the various
criteria derived in this section.
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
We consider a cognitive radio scenario with primary
users, number of transmit antennas at the secondary
base station and antennas at each of the
primary and secondary users with . Similar to works such
as [8], [12], [11], we assume the knowledge of the interference
channel which can be achieved through cooperation between
the secondary transmitters and primary user. However, in prac-
tice, partial CSI regarding the interference channel is sufcient
for transceiver design in cognitive radio scenarios. For ZFT,
this can be achieved by zeroing the interference along the
1559
Fig. 1. BER for unicast transmission.
Fig. 2. BER for multicast transmission.
dominant modes of the interference channel covariance, while
for the IOT, one can use the covariance
in the constraint in equation (2). Fig. 1 demonstrates the BER
performance for the optimal ZFT and IOT precoders based
on the sum, product and min-max MSE criteria, together with
suboptimal equal, proportional (to ) power allocation and
readily seen that the min-max MSE based precoder design
yields a signicant performance improvement in comparison
to the sum and product MSE designs and the suboptimal
equal/proportional power allocation based precoders. Further,
it can be seen that the IOT outperforms the ZFT at larger
values of the interference threshold since tolerating a marginal
interference at the primary users allows the IOT to allocate
power to its strongest modes. Also, while the CR-ZF-BD from
[11] has a poor performance, the CR-MMSE-BD has a slightly
improved performance. However, since CR-MMSE-BD has
a signicantly high computational complexity owing to the
fact that one has to iteratively solve a matrix inversion based
equation to determine the optimal parameter , our schemes
are more appealing in terms of computational complexity for
practical implementation. A similar trend is observed for the
multicast scenario with secondary users in Fig. 2.
In conclusion, this letter presents novel ZFT and IOT pre-
coder designs for cognitive radio scenarios. The proposed
framework is comprehensive and considers diverse criteria
such as sum, product and max MSE minimization. Further, the
various precoder designs have also been extended to multicast
MIMO cognitive radio scenarios.
1560
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