A Cooperative Matching Approach for Resource Management in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) can be leveraged by introducing external spectrum sensing for secondary users (SUs) to overcome the hidden primary users (PUs) problem and improve spectrum utilization. In this paper, we investigate the DSA networks with external sensors, i.e., external sensing agents, to utilize spectrum access opportunities located in cellular frequency bands. Considering the diversity of SUs\´ demands and the secondary bandwidths discovered by external sensors, it is critical to manage the detected spectrum resources in an efficient way. To this end, we formulate the resource management problem in the DSA networks as a dynamic resource demand-supply matching problem, and propose a cooperative matching solution. Specifically, spectrum access opportunities are classified into two types by the resource block size: massive sized blocks and small sized blocks. For the former type, SUs are encouraged to share the whole time-frequency block via forming coalitional groups with a "wholesale" sharing approach. For the latter type, the resource "aggregation" sharing approach is proposed to meet the time-frequency demand of individual SUs. To further reduce the delay in the spectrum allocation and compress the matching process, we develop a distributed fast spectrum sharing (DFSS) algorithm, which can deal with both two aforementioned types of resource sharing cases. Simulation results show that the DFSS algorithm can adapt to the dynamic spectrum variations in the DSA networks and the average utilization of detected spectrum access opportunities reaches nearly 90%.