TVWS policies to enable efficient spectrum sharing

The transition from analogue to the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTV) in Europe is planned to be completed by the end of the year 2012. The DTV spectrum allocation is such that there are a number of TV channels which cannot be used for additional high power broadcast transmitters due to mutual interference and hence are left unused within a given geographical location, i.e. the TV channels are geographically interleaved. The use of geographically interleaved spectrum provides for the so-called TV white spaces (TVWS) an opportunity for deploying new wireless services. The main objective of this paper is to present the spectrum policies that are suitable for TVWS at European level, identified within the COGEU project. The COGEU project aims the efficient exploitation of the geographical interleaved spectrum (TVWS). COGEU is an ICT collaborative project supported by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme. Nine partners from seven EU countries representing academia, research institutes and industry are involved in the project. The COGEU project is a composite of technical, business, and regulatory/policy domains, with the objective of taking advantage of the TV digital switchover by developing cognitive radio systems that leverage the favorable propagation characteristics of the UHF broadcast spectrum through the introduction and promotion of real-time secondary spectrum trading and the creation of new spectrum commons regimes. COGEU will also define new methodologies for compliance testing and certification of TVWS equipment to ensure non-interference coexistence with the DVB-T European standard. The innovation brought by COGEU is the combination of cognitive access to TV white spaces with secondary spectrum trading mechanisms.telecommunications,spectrum management,secondary spectrum market,regulation,TV white spaces,cognitive radio

Business Model Implications of a Cognitive Pilot Channel as enabler of Flexible Spectrum Management

This article argues that both flexible spectrum management and the concept of reconfigurability do not eliminate the need for certain centralized controlling entities, and even introduce a number of new entities performing regulatory, commercial and technical functions. One such entity, the Cognitive Pilot Channel (CPC), is presented, and different configurations of the CPC are outlined. Subsequently, the potential impact of different CPC configurations on business models for wireless services making use of such a channel is explored. The article concludes that a hybrid model combining a meta-level CPC with operator-deployed channels might provide the best mix of technical and strategic control for operators, and value for users

Applications of Repeated Games in Wireless Networks: A Survey

A repeated game is an effective tool to model interactions and conflicts for players aiming to achieve their objectives in a long-term basis. Contrary to static noncooperative games that model an interaction among players in only one period, in repeated games, interactions of players repeat for multiple periods; and thus the players become aware of other players' past behaviors and their future benefits, and will adapt their behavior accordingly. In wireless networks, conflicts among wireless nodes can lead to selfish behaviors, resulting in poor network performances and detrimental individual payoffs. In this paper, we survey the applications of repeated games in different wireless networks. The main goal is to demonstrate the use of repeated games to encourage wireless nodes to cooperate, thereby improving network performances and avoiding network disruption due to selfish behaviors. Furthermore, various problems in wireless networks and variations of repeated game models together with the corresponding solutions are discussed in this survey. Finally, we outline some open issues and future research directions.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables, 168 reference

A Trust-Based Relay Selection Approach to the Multi-Hop Network Formation Problem in Cognitive Radio Networks

One of the major challenges for today’s wireless communications is to meet the growing demand for supporting an increasing diversity of wireless applications with limited spectrum resource. In cooperative communications and networking, users share resources and collaborate in a distributed approach, similar to entities of active social groups in self organizational communities. Users’ information may be shared by the user and also by the cooperative users, in distributed transmission. Cooperative communications and networking is a fairly new communication paradigm that promises significant capacity and multiplexing gain increase in wireless networks. This research will provide a cooperative relay selection framework that exploits the similarity of cognitive radio networks to social networks. It offers a multi-hop, reputation-based power control game for routing. In this dissertation, a social network model provides a humanistic approach to predicting relay selection and network analysis in cognitive radio networks