Novel Design of Optimal Spectrum Sharing for Cognitive Radio-Enabled LTE-A Multi-Cell Networks

For long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) system, carrier aggregation (CA) allows LTE evolved Node B (eNB) and user equipment (UE) to access idle frequency spectrum to serve continuously growing traffic demands. To efficiently enhance network throughput, the concept of cognitive radio (CR) is adopted for LTE-A system to dynamically access opportunistic spectrum not occupied by primary system. Under the consideration of limited feedback system, the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is applied in this paper to estimate the channel occupancy information (COI) on shared spectrum by partially sensing the frequency carriers. A POMDP-based spectrum sharing (POSS) scheme is then proposed to realize throughput maximization via the designs of contention mechanism and resource allocation policy according to the partially observable COI, channel state information, and number of contending cells in the network. Compared with the exhaustive search, the proposed approach can achieve optimal performance gain with lower computational complexity, which is proved to be a linear time algorithm. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed POSS protocol can effectively improve system throughput on shared spectrum for the LTE-A networks.