Spectrum Self-Coexistence in Cognitive Wireless Access Networks

Future wireless access networks, characterized by a large number of small cells densely distributed in metropolitan area, are likely to be the dominating form of future wireless communications. It is expected that the dynamic spectrum access (DSA) enabled by cognitive radio (CR) technologies will act as a key for their success. Considering the high cell density and the large size of network, the spectrum coexistence will be a prominent problem in future wireless access networks. In this paper we study the spectrum self-coexistence of DSA based wireless access networks. The objective is to improve the spectrum utilization among densely distributed cells. To achieve this, topology-aware distributed algorithms are proposed for mobile terminal (MT) association and access point (AP) channel selection. The proposed algorithms enable self-coordination of spectrum in studied networks. The simulation study shows the efficiency of distributed solutions to solve the spectrum coexistence problem in proposed networks.