Minimum cost spectrum allocation with QoS guarantees in multi-interface multi-hop dynamic spectrum access networks

Spectrum Sensing as a Service (SSaS) is emerging as the enabling business model for efficient spectrum sharing in many recent applications. In such model, sensing infrastructure provides dynamic spectrum access networks, also known as cognitive radio networks, with information about availability or unavailability of given spectrum bands. In return for such information, the service provider imposes money costs on the users of the dynamic spectrum access network or its operator. In this paper, we address the problem of spectrum allocation along a route in multi-interface dynamic spectrum access networks under the SSaS model. The objective is to allocate spectrum channels to interfaces of nodes along the route so that the total sensing cost imposed by SSaS provider is minimized and the quality of links meet a predetermined QoS requirement, specifically a data rate requirement. The problem is formulated as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) to obtain the optimal solution. Given the intractable complexity of ILPs, a sub-optimal algorithm is proposed. The accuracy of the proposed algorithm is validated via extensive experimentation.