Study of channel selection strategies in cognitive radio networks

The purpose of Cognitive Radio (CR) technology is to improve the spectrum utilization and the spectrum selection is one of the important issues to achieve this objective. In CR environment, many secondary users (SU) share the available spectrum and the SU shall properly select the channel to avoid congestion on the same channel so that the throughput can be maximized. This paper proposes a systematic method to select channel for better transmission performance. A fusion center (FC) is assumed to collect the channel information sent by SUs and decides the channel for the SU that issues the transmission request. The proposed schemes adopt the weight based concept to choose the appropriate channel for the SU. Two strategies, which are the egoistic approach and the cooperative approach, are proposed in this paper to maximize the individual transmission rate and overall system throughput, respectively. Exhaustive simulations were carried out to examine the performance of the proposed schemes. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes have better performance when compared to the other scheme.