A taxonomy of coexistence mechanisms for heterogeneous cognitive radio networks operating in TV white spaces

With the development of dynamic spectrum access technologies, such as cognitive radio, the secondary use of underutilized TV broadcast spectrum has come a step closer to reality. Recently, a number of wireless standards that incorporate CR technology have been finalized or are being developed to standardize systems that will coexist in the same TV white spaces. In these wireless standards, the widely studied problem of primary-secondary network coexistence has been addressed by the use of incumbent geolocation databases augmented with spectrum sensing techniques. However, the challenging problem of secondary-secondary coexistence??in particular, heterogeneous secondary coexistence- has garnered much less attention in the standards and related literature. The coexistence of heterogeneous secondary networks poses challenging problems due to a number of factors, including the disparity of PHY/MAC strategies of the coexisting systems. In this article, we discuss the mechanisms that have been proposed for heterogeneous coexistence, and propose a taxonomy of those mechanisms targeting TVWSs. Through this taxonomy, our aim is to offer a clear picture of the heterogeneous coexistence issues and related technical challenges, and shed light on the possible solution space.