Analysis and performance evaluation of resource management mechanisms in heterogeneous traffic cognitive radio networks

Abstract In this paper, the Erlang capacity achieved by the separate or joint use of several resource management mechanisms commonly considered in the literature (spectrum aggregation, spectrum adaptation, call buffering, channel reservation, selective interruption, and preemptive prioritization) to mitigate the effects of secondary call interruptions in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) is evaluated and compared. Heterogeneous traffic is considered, and service differentiation between real-time and elastic (data) traffic is done in terms of their different delay tolerance characteristics. The aim of our investigation is to identify the most relevant resource management mechanisms to improve the performance of the considered networks. As such, both the individual and joint effect of each resource management mechanisms on system performance are evaluated with the objective of comparing the gains in capacity achieved by each resource management mechanism studied in this work. For this purpose, the different resource management mechanisms studied are carefully combined and, for each resulting strategy, optimization of its configuration is presented to maximize the achievable Erlang capacity. For the performance evaluation of the considered strategies in heterogeneous traffic CRNs, a general teletraffic analysis is developed. Numerical results show that spectrum adaptation and call buffering are the mechanisms that best exploit the elasticity of delay-tolerant traffic in heterogeneous traffic CRNs and, therefore, most significantly improve system performance

Modeling and performance analysis for mobile cognitive radio cellular networks

Abstract In this paper, teletraffic performance and channel holding time characterization in mobile cognitive radio cellular networks (CRCNs) under fixed-rate traffic with hard-delay constraints are investigated. To this end, a mathematical model to capture the effect of interruption of ongoing calls of secondary users (SUs) due to the arrival of primary users (PUs) is proposed. The proposed model relies on the use of an independent potential interruption time associated with the instant of possible interruption for each ongoing call in every visited cell. Then, a Poisson process is used to approximate the secondary users’ call interruption process due to the arrival of PUs. Based on this model and considering that unencumbered service time (UST) and cell dwell time (CDT) of SUs are independent generally distributed random variables, analytical formulae for both the probability distributions of channel holding times and inter-cell handoff attempts rate are derived. Also, a novel approximated closed-form mathematical expression for call forced termination probability of SUs is derived under the restriction that the UST is exponentially distributed. Additionally, by considering all the involved time variables exponentially distributed and employing fractional channel reservation to prioritize intra- and inter-cell handoff call attempts over new call requests, a queuing analysis to evaluate the call-level performance of CRCNs in terms of the maximum Erlang capacity is developed. The accuracy of our proposed mathematical models is extensively investigated under a variety of different evaluation scenarios for all the considered call-level performance metrics. Numerical results demonstrate that channel holding time statistics are highly sensitive to both interruption probability of ongoing secondary calls and type of probability distribution functions used to model CDT and UST. From the teletraffic perspective, numerical results reveal that the system Erlang capacity largely depends on the relative value of the mean secondary service time to the mean primary service time and the primary channels’ utilization factor. Also, the obtained results show that there exists a critical utilization factor of the primary resources from which it is no longer possible to guarantee the required quality of service of SUs and, therefore, services with hard-delay constraints cannot be even supported in CRCNs