Cognitive radio aware channel management in cellular networks

Cellular networks serve a huge amount of users but their allocated spectrum is very limited. Cognitive Radio is a potential technique to make use of underutilized bands to provide more spectrum resource to cellular network. However to make them work well together the spectrum management scheme of cellular networks need to be reconsidered. That´s because traditional schemes do not consider frequent variation of channel availability, which is common in cognitive radio networks. In this paper we propose two mechanisms addressing on this problem basing on observations from spectrum usage measurement: channel mixing and channel borrowing. Channel mixing is used to determine appropriate combination of channels for directional antennas of base stations and channel borrowing is used when too many channels on the same directional antenna become unavailable. The experiment results prove that the proposed mechanisms can increase the number of clients the cellular networks can support.