A Spectrum Switching Delay-Aware Scheduling Algorithm for Centralized Cognitive Radio Networks

We formulate a scheduling problem that takes into account different hardware delays experienced by the secondary users (SUs) in a centralized cognitive radio network (CRN) while switching to different frequency bands. We propose a polynomial-time suboptimal algorithm to address our formulated scheduling problem. We evaluate the impact of varying switching delay, number of frequencies, and number of SUs. Our simulation results indicate that our proposed algorithm is robust to changes in the hardware spectrum switching delay and its performance is very close to its upper bound. We also compare our proposed method with the corresponding constant switching delay-based algorithm and demonstrate that our suggestion of taking into account the different hardware delays while switching to different frequency bands is essential for scheduling in CRNs.