Efficient Spectrum Sharing with RF Diversity: Adapting to Nonlinearity of Front Ends

RF front-end characteristics significantly impact the performance of the receiver. Receivers are vulnerable to harmful adjacent channel interference, especially in shared spectrum environments, which allow a free-style of spectrum access with diverse receiver technologies accessing the same band of spectrum. Channel assignments agnostic to receiver characteristics can have a severe detrimental effect on network level performance of a wireless network. In this paper, we develop a novel dynamic channel assignment framework which accounts for the vulnerabilities posed by RF front end, in particular, receiver pre-selector bandwidth and front-end nonlinearity. We further propose an approximate, heuristic, greedy algorithm for channel assignment which is computationally efficient and provides a near-optimal solution. We demonstrate through simulations that the developed framework of receiver characteristics aware dynamic channel assignment will substantially improve the network-wide data rate, and thereby the overall spectrum efficiency of the wireless network. We further demonstrate that the approximate algorithm provides a near-optimal solution for channel assignment in the statistical sense.