Performance Analysis of a Control-Free Dynamic Spectrum Access Scheme

Abstract

In dynamic spectrum access (DSA), secondary users (SUs) dynamically search and access spectrum bands unused by primary users to communicate. We propose a DSA scheme where it does not require a control channel for coordination and SU nodes do not need to exchange control messages to rendezvous. Every SU node selects its operational channel independently. When a node wants to rendezvous with another node, the former estimates the operational channel of the latter. The scheme ensures that such rendezvous has a high probability of success, while operational channels are diversified to reduce co-channel interference and hence increase throughput. We develop a mathematical model to analyze the performance of the scheme. Both analytical and simulation results show that the scheme achieves very good performance.