On achieving network throughput demand in cognitive radio-based home area networks

The growing number of wireless devices for in-house use is causing a more intense use of the spectrum to satisfy the required quality-of-service such as throughput. This has contributed to spectrum scarcity and interference problems particularly in home area networks (HAN). Cognitive radio (CR) has been recognized as one of the most important technologies which could solve these problems and sustainably meeting the required communication demands by intelligently exploiting temporarily unused spectrum, including licensed spectrum. In this paper, we propose a throughput demand-based cognitive radio solution for home area networks (TD-CRHAN) which aims at effectively and efficiently meet the ever-increasing throughput demand in HAN communication. It is shown numerically and by simulations that a TD-CRHAN can satisfy the requested throughput from the network devices and has high utilization of the available throughput. The analysis further shows that, by setting the achievable throughput to be as close as possible to the total demanded throughput (instead of maximizing it), a TD-CRHAN is able to relax the tight cooperative spectrum sensing requirements which significantly improves cooperative spectrum sensing parameters, such as the local spectrum sensing time and the number of cooperative spectrum sensing devices. Finally, it is shown that these cooperative spectrum sensing parameters can be further improved when additional channels are available.