Indexed by:Journal Papers

Date of Publication:2018-04-01

Journal:IEEE-ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING

Included Journals:SCIE、EI

Volume:26

Issue:2

Page Number:685-698

ISSN No.:1063-6692

Key Words:Cognitive radio networks; dynamic spectrum sharing; cross-layer optimization; link scheduling; multi-hop multi-path routing

Abstract:Currently, the cooperation-based spectrum access in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) is implemented via cooperative communications based on link-level frame-based cooperative (LLC) approach, where individual secondary users (SUs) independently serve as relays for primary users (PUs) in order to gain spectrum access opportunities. Unfortunately, this LLC approach cannot fully exploit spectrum access opportunities to enhance the throughput of CRNs and fails to motivate PUs to join the spectrum sharing processes. To address these challenges, we propose a network-level session-based cooperative (NLC) approach, where SUs are grouped together to cooperate with PUs session by session, instead of frame by frame, for spectrum access opportunities of the corresponding group. To articulate our NLC approach, we further develop an NLC scheme under a cognitive capacity harvesting network architecture. We formulate the cooperative mechanism design as a cross-layer optimization problem with constraints on primary session selection, flow routing and link scheduling. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed NLC approach.