On the Capacity of a Class of MIMO Cognitive Radios

Abstract: Cognitive radios have been studied recently as a means to utilize spectrum in a more efficient manner. This paper focuses on the fundamental limits of operation of a MIMO cognitive radio network with a single licensed user and a single cognitive user. The channel setting is equivalent to an interference channel with degraded message sets (with the cognitive user having access to the licensed user's message). An achievable region and an outer bound is derived for such a network setting. It is shown that under certain conditions, the achievable region is optimal for a portion of the capacity region that includes sum capacity.