Delay-bandwidth product approach for unequal-width load balancing spectrum decisions in cognitive radio networks

Abstract

A cognitive radio (CR) system scans a wide spectrum to find available channels. One of the key challenges in using these temporarily available spectrums is that bandwidths of the available spectrums are not equal. In addition, the issue of competition for a single channel by many secondary users must be resolved. This paper develops a load balancing spectrum decision scheme for CR networks with unequal-bandwidth, using the concept of the delay bandwidth (DB) product to select suitable unequal-width channels. Compared with other existing unequal bandwidth spectrum decision schemes, the proposed DB-based spectrum decision can improve the overall system throughput by up to 40 % in our simulation results.