A priority-aware channel selection scheme for real-time data transmission in cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks, spectrum sensing and channel assignment are very important. Each user senses the channels and sends the results to a cluster head (CH) to make a decision about the channels by combining the results from different users. Moreover, the CH can assign the channels to the secondary users based on their requirements and priorities. In this paper, we assign the best channel(s) with the higher channel holding time to the user with highest priority. We consider two types of priorities - user priority and priority of sub-streams for each user. This policy gives more continuous channel usage to higher priority users. The results show that our scheme has higher weighted goodput than priority unaware scheme in the real-time and non-real time scenarios.