Greedy based proactive spectrum handoff scheme for cognitive radio systems

The aeronautical spectrum becomes increasingly congested due to raising number of non-stationary users, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). With the growing demand to spectrum capacity, cognitive radio technology is a promising solution to maximize the utilization of spectrum by enabling communication of secondary users (SUs) without interfering with primary users (PUs). In this paper we formulate and solve a multi-parametric objective function for proactive handoff scheme in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system constrained by QoS requirements. To improve the efficiency of handoff scheme for multiple communicating UAVs the greedy strategy is adopted. An innovative aspect of our solution includes consideration of quality of service (QoS) components, e.g. opportunistic service time, channel quality, etc. Some of these components, for example collision probability and false alarm probability, affect QoS in a negative way and are considered as constraints. Simulation of handoff scheme has been performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in selecting multiple channels when the spectrum environment changes. The performance of handoff scheme is compared with random selection method and is found outperforming the random selection method in terms of averaged utilization ratio. Analysis of results has shown that the spectrum utilization ratio can be doubled by considering wider bandwidth (more channels) and by making QoS requirements less strict. In both cases this leads to near-linear increase in time consumption for handoff scheme generation.