The remarkable growth in the demand for multimedia streaming over wireless networks is challenged by spectrum scarcity. To mitigate the effect of such a challenge, Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) were introduced as a promising technology since CRNs offer a great advantage to unlicensed users, also known as secondary users (SUs), by allowing them to opportunistically access the licensed bands when these bands are not used by their primary users (PUs). In this work, an LTE-based CRN is proposed with the objective of guaranteeing continuous video playback at the SUs end at acceptable perceptual quality. To accomplish this objective, different resource allocation schemes are introduced to adaptively assign the available channels to SUs while considering the quality of these channels as well as the buffer occupancies of the different SUs. In addition, a streaming algorithm is proposed to ensure the delivery of the base and enhancement layers of the scalable video frames within the delay constraints with priority given to the baselayers of the video frames to guarantee the continuity of video playback. Furthermore, adaptive modulation is used based on the channel state information (CSI) as fed-back by the SUs. The performance of the proposed schemes is evaluated through extensive Monte-Carlo simulations.INDEX TERMS Cognitive radio networks, Markov chains, primary radio user activity, resource allocation, LTE.

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