Virtual Spectrum Hole: Exploiting User Behavior-Aware Time-Frequency Resource Conversion

In this paper, to address network congestion stemmed from traffic generated by advanced user equipment, we propose a novel network resource allocation strategy, i.e., time-frequency resource conversion (TFRC), via exploiting user behavior, a specific kind of context information. The key idea is to use radio resources mainly on the traffic/connection to which a user pays attention. The TFRC withdraws spectrum resources strategically from connection(s) not focused on by the user, providing reuseable spectrum called “virtual spectrum hole”. Considering an LTE-type cellular network, a double-threshold guard channel policy is proposed to facilitate the implementation of TFRC. An analytical model is established to study benefits of exploiting TFRC in terms of call-level performance, including new call blocking, handoff call dropping, and recovering call dropping probabilities. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, in increasing the cell capacity (maximum user number per cell) while limiting potential service quality degradation introduced by the newly proposed technique.