Spectrum scheduling and brokering based on QoS demands of competing WISPs

During the last years, several wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) install base stations to public areas in order to offer Internet feed or voice services to users and subscribers. These base stations use licensed-exempt spectrum, and limited regulations apply during their deployment. Thus, the providers offering wireless services in overlapping geographical areas need interference-free, access resolution mechanisms to reserve and use wireless resources. Moreover, to offer guaranteed level of services to end users, WISPs need to cooperate in terms of quality of service (QoS) scheduling. Additionally, each WISP might apply diverse criteria to charge the offered services. These issues are addressed here, and a distributed medium access control scheme, called distributed QoS based dynamic channel reservation (D-QDCR), is proposed. D-QDCR allows base stations of different wireless providers to compete and reserve a carrier, based on data volumes or QoS demands, to distribute the allocated carrier, as well as time, to the associated wireless terminals and to charge the offered services accordingly