Multimedia communication over cognitive radio networks from QoS/QoE perspective: A comprehensive survey

The stringent requirements of wireless multimedia transmission lead to very high radio spectrum solicitation. Although the radio spectrum is considered as a scarce resource, the issue with spectrum availability is not scarcity, but the inefficient utilization. Unique characteristics of cognitive radio (CR) such as flexibility, adaptability, and interoperability, particularly have contributed to it being the optimum technological candidate to alleviate the issue of spectrum scarcity for multimedia communications. However, multimedia communications over CR networks (MCRNs) as a bandwidth-hungry, delay-sensitive, and loss-tolerant service, exposes several severe challenges specially to guarantee quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE). As a result, to date, different schemes based on source and channel coding, multicast, and distributed streaming, have been examined to improve the QoS/QoE in MCRNs. In this paper, we survey QoS/QoE provisioning schemes in MCRNs. We first discuss the basic concepts of multimedia communication, CRNs, QoS and QoE. Then, we present the advantages of utilizing CR for multimedia services and outline the stringent QoS and QoE requirements in MCRNs. Next, we classify the critical challenges for QoS/QoE provisioning in MCRNs including spectrum sensing, resource allocation management, network fluctuations management, latency management, and energy consumption management. Then, we survey the corresponding feasible solutions for each challenge highlighting performance issues, strengths, and weaknesses. Furthermore, we discuss several important open research problems and provide some avenues for future research.