Summary
With the advent of various emerging wireless products, the usage of limited spectrum has grown exponentially in the recent years. In the next few years, that mobile data traffic globally is expected to grow up to 50 EB/month, which is nearly a five times increase over year 2018. Therefore, it will become extremely difficult to satisfy the ever increasing demand through the current fixed spectrum assignment policy in which spectrum band is exclusively used for the particular applications, and it has also led to underutilization of a significant portion of the spectrum (like TV bands). Cognitive radio networks has emerged as a possible solution for the problem which makes dynamic spectrum access possible for unlicensed user when licensed user is not active. Among various operations of cognitive radio, channel assignment to the unlicensed user is very important. Further, wireless regional area network is one of the most important application of cognitive radio, which provides wireless broadband to the rural area using vacant TV channels. This paper discusses channel assignment techniques considering various functionalities for cognitive radio networks in respect of wireless regional area network in the existing literature. Initially, a comprehensive introduction to both cognitive radio networks and wireless regional area networks is provided, and in the end, the paper summarizes the various issues and research challenges in the channel assignment for wireless regional area networks.