An adaptive handoff strategy for cognitive radio networks

Spectrum handoff plays an important role in spectrum management as it is the process of seamlessly shifting the on-going transmission of a secondary user (SU) to a free channel without degrading the quality of service. In this paper, we develop an adaptive handoff algorithm that allows an SU to detect the arrival of a primary user (via sensing) and adapt to a reactive or a proactive handoff strategy accordingly. The adaptive handoff scheme first allows an SU to decide whether to stay and wait on current channel or to perform handoff. Then, in case of handoff, an SU intelligently shifts between proactive or reactive handoff modes based on primary use (PU) arrival rate. Further, a PU prioritized Markov approach is presented in order to model the interactions between PUs and SUs for smooth channel access. Numerical results show that the proposed handoff scheme minimizes the blocking probability, number of handoffs, handoff delay and data delivery time while maintaining channel utilization and system throughput at maximal level compared to simple reactive and proactive schemes.