Proportional Sharing in Distributed Dynamic Spectrum Access-Based Networks

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a promising technology to alleviate the exhaustion of spectral resources. To realize DSA, new technologies that enable fast discovery of the unused spectrum along with efficient spectrum management must be developed. In this paper, we propose a novel scanning algorithm and access etiquette to provide secondary devices differentiated spectrum access in a fully distributed manner. The proposed solution does not use any common control channel or require any a prior knowledge of primary devices' usage pattern. More importantly, hardware limitation such as imperfect sensing or lack of strict synchronization between secondary devices are taken into account in our design. A mathematical model and an Opnet-based implementation are also developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution in DSA networks.