Fair Resource Allocation Based on Max Weights in Cognitive Radio Networks

With the tremendous growth in wireless technology the increasing demand for spectrum resources is causing spectrum scarcity. Several surveys show that most of the time and at most of the places licensed bands are underutilized. Cognitive radio (CR) is a promising technology which has the ability to deal with the increasing demand of spectrum bands as it adapts itself according to the surrounding environmental conditions and transmits its data only through that band which is idle. To do this the CR needs to monitor the activity of licensed user continuously which is known as spectrum sensing. Spectrum sensing and sharing both are basic and essential functions of a CR to find the unused spectrum and share it efficiently. A limited amount of network resources have to be shared among many users in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). As per given channel conditions and total amount of available resource the system may allocate resource to users according to some performance measures. To maximize system throughput the system will allocate more resource to the users with better channel conditions, this causes starvation of resources in other users. So, fairness in resource allocation is equally important for efficient utilization of the available frequency bands. In this research paper we have proposed two max weight based methods to add fairness during resource allocation in a cognitive radio network. The simulation results obtained on MATLAB and their analysis is also presented. Keywordscognitive radio (CR); cognitive radio networks (CRNs); spectrum sharing; throughput maximization; fairness in resource allocation.