Modeling spectrum access strategies in cognitive radio networks using Colored Petri Nets

The spectrum access strategy is one of the important design aspects for better system capacity in cognitive radio networks (CRN), which is characterized as complex and concurrent access processing of multiple users. The common approach modeling spectrum access is Markov Chain (MC), which is prone to state space explosion with the increasing of the number of users. In this paper, an executable hierarchical Colored Petri Nets (CPN) model for the spectrum access in CRN is investigated to overcome the explicit limitation using MC. After the verification that the CPN model is isomorphic to MC in the case of arriving with Poisson distribution, the advantage of CPN on computation complexity is analyzed. Finally, a spectrum access strategy with queuing for the secondary users is proposed and modeled by CPN, which is demonstrated more flexible and workable than MC by the results.