Distributed algorithms for joint channel and RAT allocation in a cognitive digital home

The advances in radio design and wireless networking, along with the growth of multimedia home entertainment technologies, is creating the concept of a cognitive digital home requiring spectrum coexistence of various devices and networks of networks. Recent work in [1] has considered a framework for resource allocation in a cognitive digital home (CDH) with a multiplicity of radio access technologies (RAT) such as cognitive radios and legacy radio devices supporting heterogeneous applications. A spectrum manager, named the home genie node (HG), is used to coordinate spectrum coexistence across different services, with degrees of freedom ranging from transmission parameters such as frequency, bandwidth, and power, to the choice of radio access technology itself. Distributed algorithms for the resource allocation problems in a CDH, namely maximizing sum rate and maximizing service capacity, which have been previously solved using centralized approaches in [1], are designed and studied using partial Lagrangian decomposition techniques in this paper.