QoE-Driven Channel Allocation Schemes for Multimedia Transmission of Priority-Based Secondary Users over Cognitive Radio Networks

With the fast growing of multimedia communication applications, cognitive radio networks have gained the popularity as they can provide high wireless bandwidth and support quality-driven wireless multimedia services. In multimedia applications such as video conferences over the cognitive radio, the Quality of Experience (QoE) that directly measures the satisfaction of the end users cannot be easily realized due to the limited spectrum resources. The opportunistic spectrum access cognitive radio (CR) is an efficient technology to address this issue. However, the unstable channels allocated to the multimedia secondary users (SUs) can be re-occupied by the primary users (PUs) at any time, which makes the CR difficult to meet the QoE requirements. Therefore, it is important to study how to allocate frequency or spectrum resources to SUs according to their QoE requirements. This paper proposes a novel QoE-driven channel allocation scheme for SUs and cognitive radio networks (CRN) base station (BS). The historical QoE data under different primary channels (PCs) are collected by the SUs and delivered to a Cognitive Radio Base Station (CRBS). The CRBS will allocate available channel resources to the SUs based on their QoE expectations and maintain a priority service queue. The modified ON/OFF models of PCs and service queue models of SUs are jointly investigated for this channel allocation scheme. The performance of multimedia transmission of images and H.264 videos under our CR channel allocation scheme is studied, the results show that the proposed channel allocation approach can significantly improve the QoE of the priority-based SUs over the cognitive radio networks.