A Spectrum Decision Scheme for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

A Spectrum decision for Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) is able to detect the best of the free channels in the spectrum for Secondary Users (SUs), without causing interference to Primary Users (PUs). The most important issues to be efficiently handled in such networks are the high level of harmful interference to primary users, and the need to find a way to achieve an efficient utilization of available spectrum at the same time. In this work, we propose an efficient scheme, named as Weight Decision Scheme (WDS), which aims to solve the above-mentioned issues. The proposed scheme is based on the primary user activity. It helps to choose the best free channel for a SU, and reducesthe average interference to PUs. WDS improves network performance as it increases the channel utilization and decreases the interference. The achieved improvements in terms of channel utilization were 72.3%, 34.7% and 53.8% compared with Random selection (RD), Best-Fit Channel selection (BFC) and Longest Idle Time Channel selection (LITC) schemes respectively. The improvements in terms of interference were found to be 73.8%, 35.6% and 54.6% compared with the abovementioned schemes respectively. Keywords: Cognitive radio network, interference ration, spectrum utilization, RD, BFC, LITC, WDS