QoS-Aware Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Wireless Networks

We consider QoS-aware spectrum sharing in cognitive wireless networks where secondary users are allowed to access the spectrum owned by a primary network provider. The interference from secondary users to primary users is constrained to be below the tolerable limit. Also, signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of each secondary user is maintained higher than a desired level for QoS insurance. When network load is high, admission control needs to be performed to satisfy both QoS and interference constraints. We propose an admission control algorithm which is performed jointly with power control such that QoS requirements of all admitted secondary users are satisfied while keeping the interference to primary users below the tolerable limit. When all secondary users can be supported at minimum rates, we allow them to increase their transmission rates and share the spectrum in a fair manner. We formulate the joint power/rate allocation with max-min fairness criterion as an optimization problem. We show how to transform it into a convex optimization problem so that its globally optimal solution can be obtained. Numerical results show that the proposed admission control algorithm achieves performance very close to the optimal solution. Also, impacts of different system and QoS parameters on the network performance are investigated for both admission control and rate/power allocation problems.