Interference-aware high-throughput channel allocation mechanism for CR-VANETs

The incorporation of cognitive radio (CR) technology in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has given birth to a new network, namely CR-VANET, which facilitates the vehicular network to achieve communication efficiency in many resource-demanding applications including video and audio streaming, collision warning, gaming, etc. One of the primary challenges in this CR-VANET network is to allocate high-throughput licensed channels to the application requests in face of interference between the primary users (PUs) and the secondary users (SUs) and among the SUs on the channels. In this paper, we address the channel allocation problem in CR-VANET with the objective of system-wide throughput maximization while maintaining the application quality-of-service (QoS) requirements in terms of channel throughput and packet delivery delay for data transmission. We develop conflict graphs of link-band pairs to describe the interference relationship among source-destination vehicle pairs on different channels and determine independent sets of vehicle pairs that can communicate simultaneously to maximize the spatial reuse of the licensed channels. Finally, we formulate a high-throughput channel allocation problem as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed interference-aware high-throughput channel allocation mechanism (HT-CAM) provides with better network performances compared to state-of-the-art protocols.