Wireless Multimedia Cognitive Radio Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Time-critical and delay-sensitive multimedia applications require more spectrum and transmission resources. With the provision of cognitive radios (CRs), the underutilized spectrum resources can be exploited to gain more bandwidth for the bandwidth hungry applications (multimedia applications). Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) also have the flexibility to adjust their transmission parameters according to the needs of multimedia services or applications. For this reason, wireless multimedia cognitive radio networks (WMCRNs) have gained much attentions in today's research domain. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of WMCRNs. Various multimedia applications supported by CRNs, and various CR-based wireless networks are surveyed. We highlight the routing and link layer protocols used for WMCRNs. We cover the quality-of-experience design and security requirements for transmitting multimedia content over CRNs. We provide an in-depth study of white space, television white space, and cross-layer designs that have been used for WMCRNs. We also survey the major spectrum sensing approaches used for the communications of bandwidth hungry and time-critical data over CRNs.