To improve the exploiting ability and speed the convergence of the artificial bee colony (ABC),this paper proposes a dynamic acceleration population adaptive artificial bee colony (DA-PA-ABC) in which a dynamic acceleration operator and a population adaptive proportion operator are introduced. DA-PA-ABC
is applied to solve the spectrum allocation problem of cognitive radio, in which feasible solutions correspond to the allocation matrix of the TV spectrum allocation model. Network benefit and fairness are taken as the objective function of the problem to achieve reasonable allocation of the idle TV spectrum. Simulation results show that, compared with other methods, spectrum allocation based on DA-PA-ABC can maximize network benefits and ensure fairness of users.