Coding for a radio transmission system with spectrum pooling and unequal resource sharing

We examine a radio transmission system based on spectrum pooling, whereby the spectrum is divided into subchannels, and some users are allowed privileged access to the most reliable unused subchannels. The performance of this system is evaluated by assuming that a powerful error-control code is used, and hence by computing the information outage probability. It is shown that choosing the best channel improves considerably the performance of the privileged users. In addition, the remaining (unprivileged) users are penalized only marginally.