Traffic-aware self-coexistence management in IEEE 802.22 WRAN systems

Co-existence of different wireless networks and interference management are challenging problems in a Cognitive Radio (CR) environment. There are two different types of co-existence; incumbent co-existence (between licensed and unlicensed users) and self-coexistence (between secondary users in multiple overlapped Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRANs) cells). To overcome the self-coexistence problem in WRANs, many Fixed Channel Assignment (FCA) techniques have been proposed but without accounting for the cooperation overhead and the randomly time-varying traffic loads in different cells. In this paper, we investigate the self-coexistence problem between secondary users in overlapped WRAN cells with the objective of improving network performance by employing an adaptive traffic-aware channel allocation strategy. The proposed method provides interference-free environment with minimum cooperation overhead and attempts at guaranteeing pre-specified blocking probability requirements. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm provides a significant enhancement on system performance in terms of the number of served requests.