Scalable Spectrum Sharing Mechanism for Local Area Networks Deployment

The availability on the market of powerful and lightweight mobile devices has led to a fast diffusion of mobile services for end users and the trend is shifting from voice based services to multimedia contents distribution. The current access networks are, however, able to support relatively low data rates and with limited Quality of Service (QoS). In order to extend the access to high data rate services to wireless users, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) established new requirements for future wireless communication technologies of up to 1Gbps in low mobility and up to 100Mbps in high mobility conditions. These goals can be only achieved through the use highly Optimized Local Area (OLA) access networks, operating at low range and low power transmissions. The efficient sharing of radio resources among OLAs will be very difficultto achieve with a traditional network planning/dimensioning approach. Cognitive Radio (CR) based networking methodologies are considered as the most promising solutions for such radio resource sharing problems, enabling also unlicensed/open spectrum operations. In this paper we propose and evaluate a novel protocol stack for Link Layer (LL) and radio resource management (RRM) functionalities in a CR framework, able to minimize the inter-OLA interferences. A Game Theory-inspired scalable algorithm is introduced to enable a distributed resource allocation in competitive radio environments. The proof-ofconcept simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed spectrum sharing approach, achieving a better overall performance in several load and interference scenarios in terms of both outage and average capacity when compared to fixed frequency reuses cases.