A Spectrum Trading Scheme for Licensed User Incentives

Spectrum utility efficiency is key in designing systems that can meet the heavier demands of bandwidth and data rate of future communication technologies. Shared spectrum techniques and collaborative protocols have thus been studied to better utilize already existing spectrum resources. In this paper, we present a spectrum trading approach that allows the licensed user's (LU) resources to be efficiently shared with the secondary user (SU) network in exchange for a monetary cost. The model is based on demand and supply economics, wherein the highest bidder for spectrum resource is awarded with transmission rights over licensed spectrum. The transmission opportunities for the SU consider every state of the licensed link, in the form of dynamic spectrum access (DSA), spectrum sharing, and relaying, each of which has an optimized cost that will maximize the returns for the LU. The numerical results backed by the analytical study show that this spectrum trading scheme allows for significant improvements in data rate and spectrum transmission opportunities than previous work conducted in either DSA or the spectrum sharing fields.