Session Reliability and Capacity Allocation in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) networks can achieve higher spectrum efficiency by exploring the unused spectrum in licensed band. Most of the existing work focuses on maximizing the spectrum utilization while ignoring the immediate influence from the primary (licensed) users to the DSA traffic flows generated by secondary (often unlicensed) users. In this paper, we focus on providing reliability (in terms of a probabilistic life-time guarantee) to the DSA flows. We first propose 3 protection schemes, which provide different levels of pre-planned reliability to an end-to-end DSA flow. We will quantify the lifetime distributions of an end-to- end path in a DSA network under the aforementioned protection schemes. Based on our analysis of the end-to-end path lifetime distribution, various route selection algorithms are proposed to find paths with long lifetime under the corresponding protection scheme. Through simulations, we quantify the tradeoffs between required network capacity and uninterrupted call duration of DSA flows under different route selection algorithms.