Chemical Reaction Optimization for Cognitive Radio Spectrum Allocation

Cognitive radio can help increase the capacity of wireless networks by allowing unlicensed users to use the licensed bands, provided that the occupancy do not affect the prioritized licensed users. One of the fundamental problems in cognitive radio is how to allocate the available channels to the unlicensed users in order to maximize the utility. In this work, we develop an allocation algorithm based on the newly proposed chemical reaction-inspired metaheuristic called Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO). We study three utility functions for utilization and fairness, with the consideration of the hardware constraint. No matter which utility function is used, simulation results show that the CRO-based algorithm always outperforms the others dramatically.