  Spectrum management has been identified as a crucial step towards enabling
the technology of a cognitive radio network (CRN). Most of the current works
dealing with spectrum management in the CRN focus on a single task of the
problem, e.g., spectrum sensing, spectrum decision, spectrum sharing or
spectrum mobility. In this two-part paper, we argue that for certain network
configurations, jointly performing several tasks of the spectrum management
improves the spectrum efficiency. Specifically, our aim is to study the uplink
resource management problem in a CRN where there exist multiple cognitive users
(CUs) and access points (APs). The CUs, in order to maximize their uplink
transmission rates, have to associate to a suitable AP (spectrum decision), and
to share the channels used by this AP with other CUs (spectrum sharing). These
tasks are clearly interdependent, and the problem of how they should be carried
out efficiently and in a distributed manner is still open in the literature.
