Coexistence and spectral efficiency in decentralized networks

We consider a wireless communication network with a fixed number of frequency sub-bands to be shared among several transmitter-receiver pairs. In traditional frequency division (FD) systems, the available sub-bands are partitioned into disjoint clusters (frequency bands) and assigned to different users (each user transmits only in its own band). If the number of users sharing the spectrum is random, this technique may lead to inefficient spectrum utilization (a considerable fraction of the bands may remain empty most of the time). In addition, this approach inherently requires either a central network controller for frequency allocation, or cognitive radios which sense and occupy the empty bands in a dynamic fashion. These shortcomings motivate us to look for a decentralized scheme (without using cognitive radios) which allows the users to coexist, while utilizing the spectrum efficiently. We consider a frequency hopping (FH) scheme (with iid Gaussian code-books) where each user transmits over a selection of sub-bands and hops to another selection (with the same cardinality) from transmission to transmission. We derive lower and upper bounds on the achievable rate of each user and demonstrate that for large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values, the two bounds coincide. This observation enables us to compute the sum-rate multiplexing gain (SMG) of the system. Subsequently, we show how each user can regulate its rate to guarantee fairness while maximizing SMG. We compare the FH and FD systems in terms of the following performance measures: average sum-rate multiplexing gain (eta₁), average multiplexing gain per user (eta₂), the minimum multiplexing gain per user (eta₃) and service capability. We show that (depending on the probability mass function of the number of active users), the FH system can offer a significant improvement in terms of eta₁ and eta₂ (implying a more efficient usage of the spectrum). It is also shown that 1/epsi les eta₃ ^(FH)/eta₃ ^(FD) les 1, i.e., the loss incurred in eta₃ is not more than 1/epsi . Finally, computation of the so-called service capability shows that in FH systems any number of users can coexist fairly, while the maximum number of users in FD system is limited by the number of available bands.