Delay based channel allocations in multi-hop cognitive radio networks

Delay issue is a challenge in multi-hop cognitive radio networking because of the dynamic change of channels available to the cognitive radio nodes. To address this challenge, we propose a channel allocation and rate allocation scheme with low complexity in this paper. Our scheme is flexible so that it can react to the dynamic change of channel availability, and it can minimize the delay by considering the primary user activities. First, we model the primary users' activity, channel availability and the interference among the cognitive radio nodes in a cognitive radio network environment, and show how to implement a channel allocation algorithm and a rate allocation scheme in multi-hop cognitive radio networks. Second, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the end-to-end delay of the network. We consider the channel availability constraint and the primary user activities jointly, and analyze the end-to-end delay in multi-hop cognitive radio networks. In order to reduce the computing complexity, we propose a graph coloring based channel allocation and rate selection algorithm using gradient descent method. Furthermore, we show the performance of our schemes and compare them with existing schemes for different scenarios of channel availability and number of channels through simulations. Our work brings insights on how to make rate selection and channel allocation in multi-hop cognitive radio networks.