Economy of Spectrum Access in Time Varying Multichannel Networks

We consider a wireless network consisting of two classes of potentially mobile users: primary users and secondary users. Primary users license frequency channels and transmit in their respective bands as required. Secondary users resort to unlicensed access of channels that are not used by their primary users. Primaries impose access fees on the secondaries which depend on access durations and may be different for different primary channels and different available communication rates in the channels. The available rates to the secondaries change with time depending on the usage status of the primaries and the random access quality of channels. Secondary users seek to minimize their total access cost subject to stabilizing their queues whenever possible. Our first contribution is to present a dynamic link scheduling policy that attains this objective. The computation time of this policy, however, increases exponentially with the size of the network. We next present an approximate scheduling scheme based on graph partitioning that is distributed and attains arbitrary trade-offs between aggregate access cost and computation times of the schedules, irrespective of the size of the network. Our performance guarantees hold for general arrival and primary usage statistics and multihop networks. Each secondary user is, however, primarily interested in minimizing the cost it incurs, rather than in minimizing the aggregate cost. Thus, it will schedule its transmissions so as to minimize the aggregate cost only if it perceives that the aggregate cost is shared among the users as per a fair cost sharing scheme. Using concepts from cooperative game theory, we develop a rational basis for sharing the aggregate cost among secondary sessions and present a cost sharing mechanism that conforms to the above basis.