Dynamic Channel Sharing in Open-Spectrum Wireless Networks

The current fixed spectrum allocation scheme leads to significant spectrum white spaces. It requires a more effective spectrum allocation and utilization policy, which allows unused parts of spectrum to become available temporarily for commercial purposes so that the scarcity of the spectrum can be largely mitigated. This paper is an early attempt to study such wireless networks with opportunistic spectrum availability and access. We studied the dynamics in the available channels caused by the location and traffic load of the primary users and proposed several distributed algorithms to exploit the available channels for secondary users. The performance of different algorithms is evaluated in networks with static and time-varying channel availability.