Bandwidth reservation as a coexistence strategy in opportunistic spectrum access environments

We consider a scenario in which a licensed wireless operator or primary network (PN) coexists with an ad-hoc, cognitive, secondary network. To minimize harmful interference on the primary users (PUs), secondary users (SUs) sense the PU activity on the licensed spectrum band before transmitting in spectrum opportunities. We study a bandwidth reservation (BR) scheme by which the PN keeps a set of adjacent channels free of PU transmissions. These reserved channels only accommodate PU traffic when all the non-reserved channels are used, and the SUs only occupy available channels within the reserved spectrum. Intuitively, this strategy reduces collision probability and simplifies the design of opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) mechanisms. However, from the point of view of the PN, BR entails a tradeoff between the benefits of an improved coexistence with SUs, and the capacity reduction associated to having fewer options for PU channel allocation. The main objective of this paper is to determine when BR improves the overall PN performance under SU activity. The SUs are characterized by a hardware limited radio, imperfect spectrum sensing, bayesian estimation of PU activity and multichannel access. Because PU capacity is the central issue, we assume a PN capable of exploiting all the available bandwidth at every moment. By means of a Markov-reward model, we compute the expected PU capacity with and without BR, considering propagation effects, interference and random locations. The results show that, in a non-congested PN with SU activity, the interference reduction capability of BR increases the overall capacity of the PN compared to not using BR. © 1983-2012 IEEE.