Spectrum Harvesting and Sharing in Multi-Hop CRNs Under Uncertain Spectrum Supply
Miao Pan, Chi Zhang, Pan Li, Yuguang Michael Fang · IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications · 2012
The essential impediment to apply cognitive radio (CR) technology for efficient spectrum utilization lies in the uncertainty of licensed spectrum supply. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for spectrum harvesting and sharing, and investigate the joint routing and frequency scheduling problem in multi-hop cognitive radio networks (CRNs) under uncertain spectrum supply. We introduce a new service provider, Secondary Service Provider (SSP), to facilitate the accessing for secondary users (SUs). We model the vacancy of available bands with a series of random variables, and mathematically describe the corresponding frequency scheduling and flow routing constraints. From the SSP's point of view, we characterize the CRN performance with a pair of parameters (α, β), and present an optimization problem to minimize the required network-wide spectrum resource at the (α,β) level. Given that (α, β) level is specified, we obtain a lower bound for the optimization problem and develop a threshold based coarse-grained fixing algorithm for a feasible solution. Simulation results show that (i) for any (α,β) level, the proposed algorithm provides a near-optimal solution to the formulated NP-hard problem, and (ii) the (α,β) based solution is better than the expected bandwidth based one in terms of blocking ratio and spectrum utilization in multi-hop CRNs.