Admission and Eviction Control of Cognitive Radio Users at Wi-Fi 2.0 Hotspots

Cognitive radio (CR)-based Wi-Fi 2.0 hotspots are introduced as an attractive application of dynamic spectrum access (DSA), at which a wireless service provider (WSP) leases licensed channels via secondary market and offers Internet access to CR-enabled customers by opportunistically utilizing the leased spectrum. The CR users access the channels only when they are temporarily unoccupied by their legacy users, and pay a usage charge according to the WSP´s pricing policy. In this paper, we study the profit maximization problem of a WSP by deriving the (sub)optimal control of admission (at CR user arrivals) and eviction (upon return of the legacy users) of CR users. We formulate the problem as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) with two quality-of-service (QoS) constraints on arrival-blocking and service-dropping probabilities, which is solved by the linear programming techniques. Using an extensive numerical analysis, we show that the derived policy achieves up to 22.5-44 percent more profit than simple complete-sharing algorithms in the tested scenarios. In addition, we evaluate the impact of the number of leased channels and pricing on the achieved profit, and study the tradeoffs between the two QoS constraints.