Cognitive radio has been recently proposed as a promising technology to improve the spectrum utilization. In this paper, we consider the spectrum sharing between a large number of cognitive radio users and a licensed user in order to enhance the spectrum efficiency. With the deployment of M antennas at the cognitive base station, an opportunistic spectrum sharing approach is proposed to maximize the downlink throughput of the cognitive radio system and limit the interference to the primary

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... In the proposed approach, cognitive users whose channels are nearly orthogonal to the primary user channel are pre-selected so as to minimize the interference to the primary user. Then, M best cognitive users, whose channels are mutually near orthogonal to each other, are scheduled from the preselected cognitive users. A lower bound of the proposed cognitive system capacity is derived. It is then shown that opportunistic spectrum sharing approach can be extended to the multipleinput/multiple-output (MIMO) case, where a receive antenna selection is utilized in order to further reduce the computational and feedback complexity. Simulation results show that our proposed approach is able to achieve a high sum-rate throughput, with affordable complexity, when considering either single or multiple antennas at the cognitive mobile terminals.