A. Abd Manaf et al. (Eds.): ICIEIS 2011, Part III, CCIS 253, pp. 701–710, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Cooperative Communication and Cognitive Radio (CR) Technology in LTE-Advanced Faiz A. Saparudin, N. Fisal, Rozeha A. Rashid, Aimi S.A. Ghafar, and Siti M.M. Maharum Center of Excellence in Telecommunication Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Johor, Malaysia fasraf2@live.utm.my, {sheila,rozeha}@fke.utm.my, {aimisyamimi,marwangi.maharum}@fkegraduate.utm.my Abstract. Exponential increase in demands of wireless access over the years has led to rapid evolution for next generation wireless access technology. However, with scarce spectrum resource yet increasing bandwidth demand has become the main concern since this problem will hinder the evolution process and generally affects network performance. In this paper, by taking 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) LTE-Advanced (Long Term Evolution - Advanced) as a perfect specimen for 4G (fourth generation) standard candidate, we thoroughly investigate its key technologies thus providing overviews on network performance and efficiency improvement by implementing cooperative communication and cognitive radio (CR) technology. Keywords: LTE-Advanced, Cognitive Radio, Cooperative Communication, Cooperative Relay. 1 Introduction Increasing demands for wireless connection at higher throughput is the main motivation in the advancement of wireless technology. However, the limited radio spectrum resource that posed to be the key factor into supplying these demands has leads to its scarcity. Research work in [1] has developed wireless access demand model. By assuming busiest market demands, the model shows that mobile broadband network capacity would reach bottleneck by mid-2013. Although the projection were estimates, it nevertheless shows that spectrum congestion will occur in the near future if no action are taken to efficiently utilize the spectrum and proportionally increase the capacity. Thus, Cognitive Radio (CR) technology can be implemented as a way to avoid spectrum wastage and underutilization while maintaining overall system performance. CR technology also provides network environment awareness that will allow the system to self-manage and thus, will reduce manpower and operational expenses, respectively. Optimum spectrum utilization, reuse and management are essential especially in the next generation wireless communication system since it requires