Flexible architecture for spectrum and resource management in the whitespace

Abstract Spectrum resources unused in the spatio-temporal domain, so-called whitespace, can be utilised by opportunistic devices during the absence of their incumbent users. The possibility to opportunistically use whitespace implies the knowledge of diverse constraints: knowledge about whitespace utilisation, which can be obtained by spectrum sensing or from a data repository and constraints internal to the opportunistic system, such as quality of service (QoS) levels and mobility targets. The use of whitespace requires therefore a multi-faced management of the above constraints. In this paper, an architecture for use of whitespaces under QoS and mobility constraints is proposed. The proposed architecture flexibly adapts to different operating scenarios also described in this paper. Examples show how different realisations of the same architecture are derived. The interactions of constituent blocks are illustrated also with the help of charts, showing the management of context information and its use