Distributed Dynamic Spectrum Allocation for Secondary Users in a Vertical Spectrum Sharing Scenario

In this paper, we study the problem of distributed spectrum allocation under a vertical spectrum sharing scenario in a cognitive radio network. The secondary users share the spectrum licensed to the primary user by observing the activity statistics of the primary users, and regulate their transmission strategy in order to abide by the spectrum sharing etiquette. When the primary user is inactive in a subset of the available frequency bands, from the perspective of the secondary users the problem reduces to a distributed horizontal spectrum sharing. For a specific class of networks, the latter problem is addressed by the recently proposed GADIA algorithm [1]. In this paper, we present analytical and numerical results on the performance of the GADIA algorithm in conjunction with the abovementioned vertical spectrum sharing scenario. These results reveal nearoptimal performance guarantees for the overall vertical spectrum sharing scenario. key words: dynamic spectrum allocation, cognitive radios, vertical spectrum sharing