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In cognitive radio (CR) communication systems, it is challenging to achieve high rate for the secondary user (SU) in the presence of strong cross-link interference with the primary user (PU). In this letter, we exploit the recently proposed intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to tackle this problem. Specifically, we investigate an IRS-assisted CR system where an IRS is deployed to assist in the spectrum sharing between a PU link and an SU link. We aim to maximize the achievable SU rate subject to a given signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) target for the PU link, by jointly optimizing the SU transmit power and IRS reflect beamforming. Although the formulated problem is difficult to solve due to its non-convexity and coupled variables, we propose an efficient algorithm based on alternating optimization and successive convex approximation techniques to solve it sub-optimally, as well as some heuristic designs of lower complexity. Simulation results show that IRS is able to significantly improve the SU rate, even for the scenarios deemed highly challenging in conventional CR systems without the IRS.
Guan et al. (Tue,) studied this question.