We formulate throughput maximizing, max-min fair, weighted max-min fair, and proportionally fair scheduling problems for cognitive radio networks managed by a centralized cognitive base station. We propose a very general scheduling model accomplishing goals such as making frequency, time slot, and data rate allocation to secondary users with possibly multiple antennas, in a heterogenous multi-channel and multi-user scenario. Moreover, our schedulers ensure that reliable communication between the cognitive base station and secondary users are maintained, no collisions occur among secondary users, and primary users in the service area of the cognitive base station are not disturbed. Two distinctive features of our fair schedulers are that they provide joint temporal and throughput fairness, and take throughput values experienced by secondary users in the recent past, referred to as window size, into account and use this information in the current scheduling decision. We also propose a heuristic algorithm for our fair schedulers and demonstrate through simulations that our proposed heuristic yields very close solutions to the values obtained from the optimization softwares. Furthermore, we make extensive simulations to evaluate our schedulers' performance in terms of both total throughput and fairness for varying number of secondary users, frequencies, antennas, and window size.
@cite_19: Cognitive radio networks have been proposed as a solution to both spectrum inefficiency and spectrum scarcity problems. However, they face to a unique challenge based on the fluctuating nature of heterogeneous spectrum bands as well as the diverse service requirements of various applications. In this paper, a spectrum decision framework is proposed to determine a set of spectrum bands by considering the application requirements as well as the dynamic nature of spectrum bands. To this end, first, each spectrum is characterized by jointly considering primary user activity and spectrum sensing operations. Based on this, a minimum variance-based spectrum decision is proposed for real-time applications, which minimizes the capacity variance of the decided spectrum bands subject to the capacity constraints. For best-effort applications, a maximum capacity-based spectrum decision is proposed where spectrum bands are decided to maximize the total network capacity. Moreover, a dynamic resource management scheme is developed to coordinate the spectrum decision adaptively dependent on the time-varying cognitive radio network capacity. Simulation results show that the proposed methods provide efficient bandwidth utilization while satisfying service requirements.
@cite_22: Cognitive radio and Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) enable wireless users to share a wide range of available spectrums. In this paper, we study joint spectrum allocation and scheduling problems in cognitive radio wireless networks with the objectives of achieving fair spectrum sharing. A novel Multi-Channel Contention Graph (MCCG) is proposed to characterize the impact of interference under the protocol model in such networks. Based on the MCCG, we present an optimal algorithm to compute maximum throughput solutions. As simply maximizing throughput may result in a severe bias on resource allocation, we take fairness into consideration by presenting optimal algorithms as well as fast heuristics to compute fair solutions based on a simplified max-min fairness model and the well-known proportional fairness model. Numerical results show that the performance given by our heuristic algorithms is very close to that of the optimal solution, and our proportional fair algorithms achieve a good tradeoff between throughput and fairness. In addition, we extend our research to the physical interference model, and propose effective heuristics for solving the corresponding problems.
@cite_8: Cognitive radio (CR) networking achieves high utilization of the scarce spectrum resources without causing any performance degradation to the licensed users. Since the spectrum availability varies over time and space, the infrastructure-based CR networks are required to have a dynamic inter-cell spectrum sharing capability. This allows fair resource allocation as well as capacity maximization and avoids the starvation problems seen in the classical spectrum sharing approaches. In this paper, a joint spectrum and power allocation framework is proposed that addresses these concerns by (i) opportunistically negotiating additional spectrum based on the licensed user activity (exclusive allocation), and (ii) having a share of reserved spectrum for each cell (common use sharing). Our algorithm accounts for the maximum cell capacity, minimizes the interference caused to neighboring cells, and protects the licensed users through a sophisticated power allocation method. Simulation results reveal that the proposed inter-cell spectrum sharing framework achieves better fairness and higher network capacity than the conventional spectrum sharing methods.
The work in @cite_22 , for instance, concentrated on the spectrum overlay paradigm by modeling the interference as a multi-channel contention graph (MCCG). Authors in @cite_19 proposed a spectrum decision framework for centralized CRNs by considering application requirements and current spectrum conditions. Unlike our work, the work in @cite_8 focused on inter-cell spectrum sharing and proposed a joint spectrum and power allocation framework. Both @cite_19 and @cite_8 are based on the spectrum overlay paradigm since they handle spectrum availabilities as a binary decision, i.e., a spectrum band is either available or not. Our work is distinct in principle from all works in the literature about overlay spectrum sharing because we take into account the maximum allowed interference power at PUs.