Scheduling in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks: Throughput and Fairness Tradeoffs

One of the ways to harness the radio bands that are not used by their primary owners, is to allow opportunistic use of the bands to be used by secondary users such that they do not interfere with the primary users. Most often, multiple secondary users contend to acquire the bands that are available. Proper scheduling techniques can resolve such contentions. However, all scheduling techniques have their own pros and cons. In this paper, we propose scheduling algorithms for dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks that allocate channels by exploiting favorable instantaneous channel conditions of secondary users and the transmission activities of primary users. We propose two scheduling algorithms- the first one focuses on maximizing the throughput and the second one focuses on social welfare. Scheduling is performed at the beginning of each super-frame where appropriate slots(s) are assigned to secondary users. In order to better utilize the channels, multiple secondary users are allocated the same channel in the same time slot as long as there is no interference between them. However, finding such conflict-free independent set of secondary users is a NP-complete problem. We use the signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) to find the independent sets for throughput maximization, while we use the allocation history for the achieving fairness. Using simulation, we show the performances of the proposed algorithms in terms of throughput, number of slots allocated, and fairness achieved among the users.