Inter-Network Resource Sharing in IEEE 802.22 networks

IEEE 802.22 is the first worldwide standard for Cognitive Networks (CNs) that exploits unused spectrum of the television broadcast service. An IEEE 802.22 network is also called Wireless Regional Area Network (WRAN). An open issue in cognitive 802.22 networks is represented by the resource distribution among WRANs. In this paper a protocol for radio resource management for CNs in a multichannel environment is presented and analysed. In particular, the contribution of this work is a resource sharing method to schedule the WRAN access to the available channels in a community made by two o more coexisting WRANs. The method adapts to the continuous changes of the spectrum availability due to necessity of vacating a channel in case of the incumbent primary users. Moreover, the introduced allocation scheme allows to divide the available band in a proportional way to the cognitive user spectrum demands, taking into account the issue of spatial diversity, i.e. the case where the channel coverage area is not uniform. The effectiveness of the proposed multichannel scheme is proved through simulations. The results compared favorably with other methods already known in literature and show that the proposed algorithm optimize the spectral efficiency, keeping high fairness as demonstrated computing the Jain’s index*.