Cognitive Radio (CR) is an intelligent radio that can dynamically access the radio spectrum. Secondary users in Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) can access the licensed spectrum without causing harmful interference to primary users. The performance of cognitive radio networking functionalities depends on the properties of the spectrum band in use. This necessitates a crosslayer design in the entire CR networking protocol stack. Current researches are investigating different techniques of using cognitive radio to reuse more locally unused spectrums to increase the total system capacity. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cross-layer design in cognitive radio network. The cross-layer design approach jointly considers the functions of the layers to maximize the performance of CR networks.