We propose cognitive spectrum sharing with generalized selection combining (GSC) at the secondary user (SU) in the presence of multiple primary transceivers with outdated channel information. Our main motivation is to determine the impact of GSC and outdated channel information on the outage probability of cognitive spectrum sharing subject to two practical power constraints: 1) maximum transmit power at the SU transmitter and 2) peak interference temperature at the primary user (PU) receiver.
We derive new closed-form expressions for the exact and asymptotic outage probability in Rayleigh fading. Our expressions provide concise representations of the diversity order and the array gain. We confirm that the diversity order of GSC is entirely dependent on the secondary network and is equal to the available number of receiver antennas at the SU. This result is consistent with those of maximal-ratio combining (MRC) and selection combining (SC) in cognitive spectrum sharing. More importantly, our results show that the outage probability decreases with the increasing correlation coefficient of the outdated channel.