The efficient utilization of radio resources is a fundamental issue in cognitive radio (CR) networks. Thus, a novel cognitive radio resource management (RRM) is proposed to improve the spectrum utilization efficiency. An optimization framework for RRM is developed that makes the following contributions: (i) considering heterogeneous primary users (PUs) with multiple features stored in a radio environment map database, (ii) allowing variable CR demands, (iii) assuring interference protection towards PUs. After showing that the optimal solution is computationally infeasible, a suboptimal solution is consequently proposed. Performance evaluation is conducted in terms of total achieved data rate and satisfaction of CR requirements.

Peer Reviewed