Distributed Rule-Regulated Spectrum Sharing

Dynamic spectrum access is a promising technique to use spectrum efficiently. Without being restricted to any prefixed spectrum bands, nodes choose operating spectrum on-demand. Such flexibility, however, makes efficient and fair spectrum access in large-scale networks a great challenge. Prior work in this area focused on explicit coordination where nodes communicate with peers to modify local spectrum allocation, and may heavily stress the communication resource. In this paper, we introduce a distributed spectrum management architecture where nodes share spectrum resource fairly by making independent actions following spectrum rules. We present five spectrum rules to regulate node behavior and maximize system fairness and spectrum utilization, and analyze the associated complexity and overhead. We show analytically and experimentally that the proposed rule-based approach achieves similar performance with the explicit coordination approach, while significantly reducing communication cost.