Layered content delivery over satellite integrated cognitive radio networks

Although the spectrum is a scarce and valuable resource, the utilization of spectrum in various frequency bands in certain areas are shown to be very low. Because of this under-utilization and inefficiency, cognitive radio (CR) concept where licensed bands are allowed to be used by a secondary network is being developed. Moreover, this new phenomenon has been coexisting with the exploding content consumption over wireless networks. Upcoming fifth generation (5G) wireless standards have been developed to address this capacity crunch. In 5G "toolkit", Device-to-device (D2D) communications is an important approach adopted to alleviate this issue. Moreover, heterogeneous wireless networks composed of different network tiers are expected to provide services in an omnipresent setting. In this thesis, we develop an analytical Markovian model for content delivery over satellite integrated cognitive radio networks. Additionally, we devise a simulation for studying this infrastructure-based mobile network. The simulation model is focused on energy efficiency. However, it can be extended for other performance evaluation purposes. We also investigate the effect of various system parameters on the performance of these systems such as network density, preference ratios for content retrieval from different content holders and average content size in this setting.