• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.29-39
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• 2009

The need for radio spectrum is recently considered as a huge hurdle towards the rapid development of wireless networks. Large parts of the spectrum are allocated to licensed radio services in proprietary way. However, enormous success of the wireless services and technologies in the unlicensed bands has brought new ideas and innovations. In recent years cognitive radio has gained much attention for solving the spectrum scarcity problem. It changes the way spectrum is regulated so that more efficient spectrum utilization is possible. Multi-hop relay technology on the other hand has intensively been studied in the area of ad hoc and peer-to-peer networks. But in cellular network, only recently the integration of multi-hop capability is considered to enhance the performance significantly. Multi-hop relaying can extend the coverage of the cell to provide high data rate service to a greater distance and in the shadowed regions. Very few papers still exist that combine these methods to maximize the spectrum utilization. Thus we propose a network architecture combining these two technologies in a way to maximize the system throughput. We present the throughput capacity equations for the proposed system model considering various system parameters like utilization factor by the primary users and primary users' transmission radius and through extensive numerical simulations we analyze the significance of work.