Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 4493: Spectrum-Efficient Resource Allocation in Multi-Radio Multi-Hop Cognitive Radio Networks (Sensors)

The multi-hop cognitive radio network (CRN) has attracted much attention in industry and academia because of its seamless wireless coverage by forming multi-hop links and high spectrum utilization of cognitive radio (CR) technology. Using multi-slot statistical spectrum status information (SSI), this work investigates the average spectrum efficiency (SE) of a multi-radio multi-hop (MRMH) CRN where each hop is permitted to use different spectra and long-distance hops can reuse the same idle primary user (PU) spectrum. Faced with the modeled SE problem, which is a complex non-convex fractional mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, the optimal spectrum and power allocation for multi-hop links in multi-slot and multi-channel scenarios can be obtained with the proposed successive multi-step convex approximation scheme (SMCA). As shown through computational complexity and simulation analysis, SMCA can obtain an approximate lower bound of the optimal solution for the modeled SE problem with a lower computational cost. Furthermore, some potential relationships between network performance and spectrum idle rate can be easily discussed with SMCA, which can provide some sensible deployment strategies for the MRMH CRN in future multi-slot scenarios.