Title: Applications architectures and protocol design issues for cognitive radio networks: a survey

Authors: Saed Alrabaee; Mahmoud Khasawneh; Anjali Agarwal; Nishith Goel; Marzia Zaman

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada ' Cistel Technology Inc., Ottawa, Canada ' Cistel Technology Inc., Ottawa, Canada

Abstract: The CRN technology permits the unlicensed operation to be in licensed band. The CRN model poses many challenges in power efficiency, spectrum management, spectrum detection, environment awareness, new distributed algorithm design, distributed spectrum measurements, QoS guarantees, and security. Cognitive radio (CR) is an emerging technology that allows the dynamic deployment of highly adaptive radios that are built upon software-defined radio technology. CR has been considered as a main technology for future wireless communications and mobile communication. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the CRN specifically from the perspectives of applications, network architectures and protocol design issues. First, major applications of the CRN are reviewed. Then, different architectures of the CRN are presented. The unique characteristics of CRN rise to different protocol design issues. These research issues (e.g. spectrum management, interference, routing, security, and location complexity) and the related approaches to address them in the CRN are described.

Keywords: CRNs; cognitive radio networks; spectrum management; interference; routing protocols; network security; location complexity; applications; network architectures; protocol design; quality of service; QoS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2014.064813

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2014 Vol.7 No.5, pp.415 - 427

Received: 02 Aug 2013
Accepted: 15 Aug 2013
Published online: 31 Oct 2014 *

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