Capacity Analysis in Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Cognitive Radio Networks: A Small World Perspective

Abstract: Cognitive radio (CR) has emerged as a promising technology to improve spectrum utilization. Capacity analysis is very useful in investigating the ultimate performance limits for wireless networks. Meanwhile, with increasing potential future applications for the CR systems, it is necessary to explore the limitations on their capacity in a dynamic spectrum access environment. However, due to spectrum sharing in cognitive radio networks (CRNs), the capacity of the secondary network (SRN) is much more difficult to analyze than that of traditional wireless networks. To overcome this difficulty, in this paper we introduce a novel solution based on small world model to analyze the capacity of SRN. First, we propose a new method of shortcut creation for CRNs, which is based on connectivity ratio. Also, a new channel assignment algorithm is proposed, which jointly considers the available time and transmission time of the channels. And then, we derive the capacity of SRN based on the small world model over multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) environment. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme can obtain a higher capacity and smaller latency compared with traditional schemes in MRMC CRNs.