Low-complexity hierarchical spectrum sharing scheme in cognitive radio networks

Fair and efficient spectrum sharing is an important problem in cognitive radios. In view of the clustering cognitive radio network with capacity-limited common channels, this letter proposes a low-complexity hierarchical spectrum sharing method, which is carried out in two steps. First, the spectrum holes are allocated to clusters in a fair and distributed way by using the list-coloring method. Then, all the channels in every spectrum hole are allocated by cluster head to minimize the outage probability by using the maximum matching method. Such a scheme not only takes a great advantage of the low signaling overhead and computation complexity, but also achieves the suboptimal outage performance which is close to that of the exhaustive search.