Beyond Overlay: Reaping Mutual Benefits for Primary and Secondary Networks Through Node-Level Cooperation
Xu Yuan, Yi Shi, Xiaoqi Qin, Y. Thomas Hou, Wenjing Lou, Sastry Kompella, Scott F. Midkiff, Jeffrey H. Reed · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2016
Existing spectrum sharing paradigms have set clear boundaries between the primary and secondary networks. There is either no or very limited node-level cooperation between the primary and secondary networks. In this paper, we develop a new and bold spectrum-sharing paradigm beyond the state of the art for future wireless networks. We explore network cooperation as a new dimension for spectrum sharing between the primary and secondary users. Such network cooperation can be defined as a set of policies under which different degrees of cooperation are to be achieved. The benefits of this paradigm are numerous, as they allow integrating resources from two networks. There are many possible node-level cooperation policies that one can employ under this paradigm. For the purpose of performance study, we consider a specific policy called United cooperation of Primary and Secondary (UPS) networks. UPS allows a complete cooperation between the primary and secondary networks at the node level to relay each other's traffic. As a case study, we consider a problem with the goal of supporting the rate requirement of the primary network traffic while maximizing the throughput of the secondary sessions. For this problem, we develop an optimization model and formulate a combinatorial optimization problem. We also develop an approximation solution based on a piece-wise linearization technique. Simulation results show that UPS offers significantly better throughput performance than that under the interweave paradigm.