Generic Multiuser Coordinated Beamforming for Underlay Spectrum Sharing

The beamforming techniques have been recently studied as possible enablers for underlay spectrum sharing. The existing beamforming techniques have several common limitations: they are usually system model specific, cannot operate with arbitrary number of transmit/receive antennas, and cannot serve arbitrary number of users. Moreover, the beamforming techniques for underlay spectrum sharing do not consider the interference originating from the incumbent primary system. This work extends the common underlay sharing model by incorporating the interference originating from the incumbent system into generic combined beamforming design that can be applied on interference, broadcast or multiple access channels. The paper proposes two novel multiuser beamforming algorithms for user fairness and sum rate maximization, utilizing newly derived convex optimization problems for transmit and receive beamformers calculation in a recursive optimization. Both beamforming algorithms provide efficient operation for the interference, broadcast and multiple access channels, as well as for arbitrary number of antennas and secondary users in the system. Furthermore, the paper proposes a successive transmit/receive optimization approach that reduces the computational complexity of the proposed recursive algorithms. The results show that the proposed complexity reduction significantly improves the convergence rates and can facilitate their operation in scenarios which require agile beamformers computation.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure

Information reuse in dynamic spectrum access

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA), where the permission to use slices of radio spectrum is dynamically shifted (in time an in different geographical areas) across various communications services and applications, has been an area of interest from technical and public policy perspectives over the last decade. The underlying belief is that this will increase spectrum utilization, especially since many spectrum bands are relatively unused, ultimately leading to the creation of new and innovative services that exploit the increase in spectrum availability. Determining whether a slice of spectrum, allocated or licensed to a primary user, is available for use by a secondary user at a certain time and in a certain geographic area is a challenging task. This requires 'context information' which is critical to the operation of DSA. Such context information can be obtained in several ways, with different costs, and different quality/usefulness of the information. In this paper, we describe the challenges in obtaining this context information, the potential for the integration of various sources of context information, and the potential for reuse of such information for related and unrelated purposes such as localization and enforcement of spectrum sharing. Since some of the infrastructure for obtaining finegrained context information is likely to be expensive, the reuse of this infrastructure/information and integration of information from less expensive sources are likely to be essential for the economical and technological viability of DSA. © 2013 IEEE

Cognitive Radio Networks: Realistic or Not?

A large volume of research has been conducted in the cognitive radio (CR) area the last decade. However, the deployment of a commercial CR network is yet to emerge. A large portion of the existing literature does not build on real world scenarios, hence, neglecting various important interactions of the research with commercial telecommunication networks. For instance, a lot of attention has been paid to spectrum sensing as the front line functionality that needs to be completed in an efficient and accurate manner to enable an opportunistic CR network architecture. This is necessary to detect the existence of spectrum holes without which no other procedure can be fulfilled. However, simply sensing (cooperatively or not) the energy received from a primary transmitter cannot enable correct dynamic spectrum access. For example, the low strength of a primary transmitter's signal does not assure that there will be no interference to a nearby primary receiver. In addition, the presence of a primary transmitter's signal does not mean that CR network users cannot access the spectrum since there might not be any primary receiver in the vicinity. Despite the existing elegant and clever solutions to the DSA problem no robust, implementable scheme has emerged. In this paper, we challenge the basic premises of the proposed schemes. We further argue that addressing the technical challenges we face in deploying robust CR networks can only be achieved if we radically change the way we design their basic functionalities. In support of our argument, we present a set of real-world scenarios, inspired by realistic settings in commercial telecommunications networks, focusing on spectrum sensing as a basic and critical functionality in the deployment of CRs. We use these scenarios to show why existing DSA paradigms are not amenable to realistic deployment in complex wireless environments.Comment: Work in progres

Spectrum Trading: An Abstracted Bibliography

This document contains a bibliographic list of major papers on spectrum trading and their abstracts. The aim of the list is to offer researchers entering this field a fast panorama of the current literature. The list is continually updated on the webpage \url{http://www.disp.uniroma2.it/users/naldi/Ricspt.html}. Omissions and papers suggested for inclusion may be pointed out to the authors through e-mail (\textit{[email protected]})