The incorporation of cognitive radio (CR) technology in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has given birth to a new network, namely CR-VANET, which facilitates the vehicular network to achieve communication efficiency in many resource-demanding applications including video and audio streaming, collision warning, gaming, etc. One of the primary challenges in this CR-VANET network is to allocate high-throughput licensed channels to the application requests in face of interference between the

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... ry users (PUs) and the secondary users (SUs) and among the SUs on the channels. In this paper, we address the channel allocation problem in CR-VANET with the objective of system-wide throughput maximization while maintaining the application quality-of-service (QoS) requirements in terms of channel throughput and packet delivery delay for data transmission. We develop conflict graphs of link-band pairs to describe the interference relationship among source-destination vehicle pairs on different channels and determine independent sets of vehicle pairs that can communicate simultaneously to maximize the spatial reuse of the licensed channels. Finally, we formulate a high-throughput channel allocation problem as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed interference-aware high-throughput channel allocation mechanism (HT-CAM) provides with better network performances compared to state-of-the-art protocols. Introduction The increasing number of on-road vehicles, their use of smart devices, and significant rise in vehicular applications and services, especially in urban environments, have resulted in an overlay crowded dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) spectrum in the 5.9-GHz band. This spectrum scarcity causes degraded vehicular communication efficiency for safety applications (e.g., collision warning, road traffic reporting), bandwidth demanding real-time multimedia (e.g., video and audio streaming), and other legacy applications (e.g., email, web surfing, and so on) [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] . However, the spectrum utilization measurements over the past few years indicated a notable number of unused and underused licensed spectrum bands over different space and time. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), temporal and