Cooperative and distributed spectrum sharing in dynamic spectrum pooling networks

In dynamic spectrum access systems, such as cognitive radio networks, spectrum pooling is one of the approaches to manage the available spectrum bands from different licensed networks. Based on the concept of spectrum pooling, most previous work focuses on the system architecture and the design of flexible access algorithms and schemes. In this paper, a cooperative and distributed scheme for dynamic internetwork spectrum sharing among multiple networks is proposed, taking into account the spectrum access price and the spectrum efficiency. Specifically, the spectrum sharing problem is formulated as a restless bandits model-based optimization system, which dramatically reduces the complexity of the scheme by allowing the spectrum allocation scheme to be simply select the network with the lowest index. Extensive simulation results illustrate that the proposed scheme improves the performance significantly compared to the existing scheme that ignores the distributed and cooperative spectrum sharing.