Quiet Period (QP) Scheduling Across Heterogeneous Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA)-Based Systems

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a promising technology to improve spectrum utilization. One key issue in DSA is the protection of primary devices from interference caused by secondary devices. In this paper, we discuss this issue in the context of spectrum sensing. Sensing problems resulting from collocated sensing and non-sensing secondary systems — together referred to as heterogeneous DSA systems — are identified and a novel quiet period (QP) scheduling algorithm is proposed. The algorithm guarantees a sensing secondary system to detect returning primary devices in bounded time, without any communication or synchronization with collocated non-sensing secondary systems. We prove the guarantee via mathematical induction and analyze the performance. The algorithm is implemented in a universal software radio peripheral (USRP)-based test bed to demonstrate its feasibility. The results show that our solution is applicable to heterogeneous IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area networks (WRANs), ECMA-392 wireless personal area network (WPANs), and even the future IEEE 802.11af wireless local area networks (WLANs) in the UHF TV bands.