A Column Generation Approach for Spectrum Allocation in Cognitive Wireless Mesh Network

Cognitive radio (CR) has the potential to substantially improve the system capacity and adaptability of wireless mesh network (WMN). In this paper we investigate the achievable performance gain of cognitive wireless mesh network (CWMN), in which all nodes are equipped with CRs, by jointly optimizing spectrum allocation, routing and time scheduling. The formulated optimization problem aims to minimize the system activation time to satisfy the given traffic demands, under the constraint of multiple access interference and the limited available spectrum bands at each node. Then we develop a column generation (CG) approach to solve this problem. Our analytical model is validated by the simulation results, which provide a better performance compared with fixed bandwidth allocation.