Abstract
Cognitive Radio technology is an emerging technology which enables the temporary use of the unused licensed spectrum without interfering with the transmissions of other users, thereby improving spectrum utilization. The spectrum is dynamically reused by the alteration of its power, frequency, modulation, and other operating parameters after sensing its radio frequency environment. Since cognitive radio is envisaged to solve the problem of scarcity of the spectrum by making use of a large under-utilized spectrum, it can be applied in wireless mesh networks' paradigm for a larger network capacity with high-quality services for the end user. Interference is a critical issue in cognitive radio wireless mesh networks (CR WMNs) performance. In this work, first an analytical model was developed for link scheduling in CR WMNs considering scheduling constraints. Then a novel scheduling algorithm was proposed and implemented to minimize interference in CR WMNs. Simulation results show effectiveness of our proposed algorithm as the results are very close to the near optimum solution.