Decentralized Transmission Strategies for Delay-sensitive Applications over Spectrum Agile Networks

With the growing demand of radio resources, maximizing spectrum efficiency becomes increasingly important. Traditional static spectrum allocation lacks effective mechanisms for sharing spectral resources. Through adaptive resource allocation, spectrum agility allows the radio devices to dynamically use the idle spectral band and is becoming increasingly attractive because it can provide a large number of resources for delay sensitive and high-bandwidth applications such as multimedia transmission. In this paper, we show how spectrum agility may be used to satisfy delay sensitive applications over wireless networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of networks using spectrum agility presents significant improvements over existing networks. By utilizing a decentralized, non-cooperative channel searching and switching strategy, different users with various throughput requirements can share the available channel resources in an efficient way to satisfy their own packet loss and delay constraints.