A Spectrum Sharing Framework for Intelligent Next Generation Wireless Networks

Abstract

The explosive emergence of wireless technologies and standards, covering licensed and unlicensed spectrum bands, has triggered the appearance of a huge amount of wireless technologies, with many of them competing for the same spectrum band instead of harmoniously sharing it. Unfortunately, the wireless spectrum is a scarce resource, and the available frequency bands will not scale with the foreseen demand for new capacity. Certain parts of the spectrum, in particular the license-free ISM bands, are overcrowded, while other parts, mostly licensed bands, may be significantly underutilized. As such, there is a need to introduce more advanced techniques to access and share the wireless medium, either to improve the coordination within a given band or to explore the possibilities of intelligently using unused spectrum in underutilized (e.g., licensed) bands. Therefore, in this paper, we present an open source software-defined radio-based framework that can be employed to devise disruptive techniques to optimize the sub-optimal use of radio spectrum that exists today. We describe three use cases where the framework can be employed along with intelligent algorithms to achieve improved spectrum utilization. In addition, we provide several experimental results showing the performance and effectiveness of the proposed framework.