Dynamic spectrum access based on cognitive radio has been regarded as a prospective solution to improve spectrum utilization for wireless communications. By considering the allocation efficiency, fairness, and economic incentives, spectrum marketing has been attracting more and more attentions in recent years. In this thesis, we focus on one of the most effective spectrum marketing methods, i.e., auction approach, in multi-channel cognitive radio networks. After presenting some fundamentals and related works, we begin our discussion in a recall-based auction system where buyers have various service requirements and the seller could recall some sold items after the auction to deal with a sudden increase of its own demand. Both single-winner and multi-winner auctions are designed and analyzed. In addition, we also consider the heterogeneity of radio resource sellers and formulate a framework of combinatorial spectrum auction. With theoretical analyses and simulation results, we show that our proposed algorithms can improve spectrum utilization while satisfy the heterogeneous requirements of different wireless users.

This brief focuses on the current research on mechanism design for dynamic spectrum sharing in cognitive radio (CR) networks. Along with a review of CR architectures and characteristics, this brief presents the motivations, significances and unique challenges of implementing algorithmic mechanism design for encouraging both primary spectrum owners and secondary spectrum users to participate in dynamic spectrum sharing. The brief then focuses on recent advances in mechanism design in CR networks. With an emphasis on dealing with the uncertain spectrum availabilities, mechanisms based on spectrum recall, two-stage spectrum sharing and online spectrum allocation are introduced with the support of theoretic analyses and numerical illustrations. The brief concludes with a discussion of potential research directions and interests, which will motivate further studies on mechanism design for wireless communications. This brief is concise and approachable for researchers, professionals and advanced-level students in wireless communications and networks.

This book, written by leading experts from academia and industry, offers a condensed overview on hot topics among the Cognitive Radios and Networks scientific and industrial communities (including those considered within the framework of the European COST Action IC0902) and presents exciting visions for the future. Examples of the subjects considered include the design of new filter bank-based air interfaces for spectrum sharing, medium access control design protocols, the design of cloud-based radio access networks, an evolutionary vision for the development and deployment of cognitive TCP/IP, and regulations relevant to the development of a spectrum sharing market. The concluding chapter comprises a practical, hands-on tutorial for those interested in developing their own research test beds. By focusing on the most recent advances and future avenues, this book will assist researchers in understanding the current issues and solutions in Cognitive Radios and Networks designs.

This book discusses the use of the spectrum sharing techniques in cognitive radio technology, in order to address the problem of spectrum scarcity for future wireless communications. The authors describe a cognitive radio medium access control (MAC) protocol, with which throughput maximization has been achieved. The discussion also includes use of this MAC protocol for imperfect sensing scenarios and its effect on the performance of cognitive radio systems. The authors also discuss how energy efficiency has been maximized in this system, by applying a simple algorithm for optimizing the transmit power of the cognitive user. The study about the channel fading in the cognitive user and licensed user and power adaption policy in this scenario under peak transmit power and interference power constraint is also present in this book.

This brief presents research results on social cognitive radio networks, a transformational and innovative networking paradigm that promotes the nexus between social interactions and cognitive radio networks. Along with a review of the research literature, the text examines the key motivation and challenges of social cognitive radio network design. Three socially inspired distributed spectrum sharing mechanisms are introduced: adaptive channel recommendation mechanism, imitation-based social spectrum sharing mechanism, and evolutionarily stable spectrum access mechanism. The brief concludes with a discussion of future research directions which ascertains that exploiting social interactions for distributed spectrum sharing will advance the state-of-the-art of cognitive radio network design, spur a new line of thinking for future wireless networks, and enable novel wireless service and applications.

This book gives a comprehensive overview of the medium access control (MAC) principles in cognitive radio networks, with a specific focus on how such MAC principles enable different wireless systems to coexist in the same spectrum band and carry out spectrum sharing. From algorithm design to the latest developments in the standards and spectrum policy, readers will benefit from leading-edge knowledge of how cognitive radio systems coexist and share spectrum resources. Coverage includes cognitive radio rendezvous, spectrum sharing, channel allocation, coexistence in TV white space, and coexistence of heterogeneous wireless systems.

This SpringerBrief focuses on spectrum trading designs in multi-hop cognitive radio networks. It starts with the motivation for spectrum trading and the review of existing spectrum trading designs. Then, it presents a novel CRN architecture for spectrum trading considering spectrum trading’s economic features and wireless nature. Under this network architecture, it extends current single-hop per-user based spectrum trading design into a multi-hop transmission opportunity based one, and further into a session based one, while having economic properties guaranteed. This SpringerBrief not only provides a good review of current spectrum trading designs, it also touches on the cutting-edge interdisciplinary spectrum trading research on disparate fields of modeling, network architecture design, optimization theories, statistics, and economic theories. Advanced-level students studying computer science, electrical and computer engineering and economics, wireless network planners, and wireless spectrum engineers will find this book a useful tool.

The popularity of ubiquitous Internet services has spurred the fast growth of wireless communications by launching data hungry multimedia applications to mobile devices. Powered by spectrum agile cognitive radios, the newly emerged cognitive radio networks (CRN) are proposed to provision the efficient spectrum reuse to improve spectrum utilization. Unlicensed users in CRN, or secondary users (SUs), access the temporarily idle channels in a secondary and opportunistic fashion while preventing harmful interference to licensed primary users (PUs). To effectively detect and exploit the spectrum access opportunities released from a wide spectrum, the heterogeneous wireless channel characteristics and the underlying prioritized spectrum reuse features need to be considered in the protocol design and resource management schemes in CRN, which plays a critical role in unlicensed spectrum sharing among multiple users. The purpose of this dissertation is to address the challenges of utilizing heterogeneous wireless channels in CRN by its intrinsic dynamic and diverse natures, and build the efficient, scalable and, more importantly, practical dynamic spectrum access mechanisms to enable the cost-effective transmissions for unlicensed users. Note that the spectrum access opportunities exhibit the diversity in the time/frequency/space domain, secondary transmission schemes typically follow three design principles including 1) utilizing local free channels within short transmission range, 2) cooperative and opportunistic transmissions, and 3) effectively coordinating transmissions in varying bandwidth. The entire research work in this dissertation casts a systematic view to address these principles in the design of the routing protocols, medium access control (MAC) protocols and radio resource management schemes in CRN. Specifically, as spectrum access opportunities usually have small spatial footprints, SUs only communicate with the nearby nodes in a small area. Thus, multi-hop transmissions in CRN are considered in this dissertation to enable the connections between any unlicensed users in the network. CRN typically consist of intermittent links of varying bandwidth so that the decision of routing is closely related with the spectrum sensing and sharing operations in the lower layers. An efficient opportunistic cognitive routing (OCR) scheme is proposed in which the forwarding decision at each hop is made by jointly considering physical characteristics of spectrum bands and diverse activities of PUs in each single band. Such discussion on spectrum aware routing continues coupled with the sensing selection and contention among multiple relay candidates in a multi-channel multi-hop scenario. An SU selects the next hop relay and the working channel based upon location information and channel usage statistics with instant link quality feedbacks. By evaluating the performance of the routing protocol and the joint channel and route selection algorithm with extensive simulations, we determine the optimal channel and relay combination with reduced searching complexity and improved spectrum utilization. Besides, we investigate the medium access control (MAC) protocol design in support of multimedia applications in CRN. To satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements of heterogeneous applications for SUs, such as voice, video, and data, channels are selected to probe for appropriate spectrum opportunities based on the characteristics and QoS demands of the traffic along with the statistics of channel usage patterns. We propose a QoS-aware MAC protocol for multi-channel single hop scenario where each single SU distributedly determines a set of channels for sensing and data transmission to satisfy QoS requirements. By analytical model and simulations, we determine the service differentiation parameters to provision multiple levels of QoS. We further extend our discussion of dynamic resource management to a more practical deployment case. We apply the experiences and skills learnt from cognitive radio study to cellular communications. In heterogeneous cellular networks, small cells are deployed in macrocells to enhance link quality, extend network coverage and offload traffic. As different cells focus on their own operation utilities, the optimization of the total system performance can be analogue to the game between PUs and SUs in CRN. However, there are unique challenges and operation features in such case. We first present challenging issues including interference management, network coordination, and interworking between cells in a tiered cellular infrastructure. We then propose an adaptive resource management framework to improve spectrum utilization and mitigate the co-channel interference between macrocells and small cells. A game-theory-based approach is introduced to handle power control issues under constrained control bandwidth and limited end user capability. The inter-cell interference is mitigated based upon orthogonal transmissions and strict protection for macrocell users. The research results in the dissertation can provide insightful lights on flexible network deployment and dynamic spectrum access for prioritized spectrum reuse in modern wireless systems. The protocols and algorithms developed in each topic, respectively, have shown practical and efficient solutions to build and optimize CRN.

Cognitive Radio Communications and Networks gives comprehensive and balanced coverage of the principles of cognitive radio communications, cognitive networks, and details of their implementation, including the latest developments in the standards and spectrum policy. Case studies, end-of-chapter questions, and descriptions of various platforms and test beds, together with sample code, give hands-on knowledge of how cognitive radio systems can be implemented in practice. Extensive treatment is given to several standards, including IEEE 802.22 for TV White Spaces and IEEE SCC41 Written by leading people in the field, both at universities and major industrial research laboratories, this tutorial text gives communications engineers, R&D engineers, researchers, undergraduate and post graduate students a complete reference on the application of wireless communications and network theory for the design and implementation of cognitive radio systems and networks - Each chapter is written by internationally renowned experts, giving complete and balanced treatment of the fundamentals of both cognitive radio communications and cognitive networks, together with implementation details - Extensive treatment of the latest standards and spectrum policy developments enables the development of compliant cognitive systems - Strong practical orientation – through case studies and descriptions of cognitive radio platforms and testbeds – shows how real world cognitive radio systems and network architectures have been built Alexander M. Wyglinski is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Director of the WPI Limerick Project Center, and Director of the Wireless Innovation Laboratory (WI Lab) - Each chapter is written by internationally renowned experts, giving complete and balanced treatment of the fundamentals of both cognitive radio communications and cognitive networks, together with implementation details - Extensive treatment of the latest standards and spectrum policy developments enables the development of compliant cognitive systems - Strong practical orientation – through case studies and descriptions of cognitive radio platforms and testbeds – shows how "real world" cognitive radio systems and network architectures have been built