Opportunistic spectrum sharing in software defined wireless network

Over the past few decades, the world has witnessed a rapid growth in mobile and wireless networks (MWNs) which significantly change human life. However, proliferating mobile demands lead to several intractable challenges that MWN has to face. Software-defined network is expected as a promising way for future network and has captured growing attention. Network virtualization is an essential feature in software-defined wireless network (SDWN), and it brings two new entities, physical networks and virtual networks. Accordingly, efficiently assigning spectrum resource to virtual networks is one of the fundamental problems in SDWN. Directly orienting towards the spectrum resource allocation problem, firstly, the fluctuation features of virtual network requirements in SDWN are researched, and the opportunistic spectrum sharing method is introduced to SDWN. Then, the problem is proved as NP-hardness. After that, a dynamic programming and graph theory based spectrum sharing algorithm is proposed. Simulations demonstrate that the opportunistic spectrum sharing method conspicuously improves the system performance up to around 20%–30% in SDWN, and the proposed algorithm achieves more efficient performance.