A Scalable Spectrum-Sharing Mechanism for Local Area Network Deployment

Current wireless access networks are able to provide relatively low data rates when compared with wired access. To extend the access to high-data-rate services to wireless users, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) established new requirements for future wireless communication technologies of up to 100 Mb/s under high-mobility conditions and 1 Gb/s in low mobility. The low mobility goal can only be achieved through the use of highly optimized local area access networks operating at low range and low transmission power. The efficient sharing of radio resources among local area cells will be very difficult to achieve with a traditional network planning/dimensioning approach due to their intrinsic uncoordinated deployment characteristic. Cognitive radio (CR)-based networking methodologies are considered as the most promising solutions for such radio-resource-sharing problems, also enabling unlicensed/open spectrum operations. In this paper, a game-theory-inspired scalable algorithm for intercell dynamic spectrum access (IC-DSA) is introduced to enable distributed resource allocation in CR environments. Here, the new CR-based cell is called “cognitive cell (C-cell),” and it is the minimal entity that allocates a resource set. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed spectrum-sharing approach. This solution achieves a better overall performance in several load and interference scenarios in terms of both outage and average capacity when compared with fixed-frequency-reuse cases.