Scheduling Heterogeneous Wireless Systems for Efficient Spectrum Access

The spectrum scarcity problem emerged in recent years, due to unbalanced utilization of RF (radio frequency) bands in the current state of wireless spectrum allocations. Spectrum access scheduling addresses challenges arising from spectrum sharing by interleaving the channel access among multiple wireless systems in a TDMA fashion. Different from cognitive radio approaches which are opportunistic and noncollaborative in general, spectrum access scheduling proactively structures and interleaves the channel access pattern of heterogeneous wireless systems, using collaborative designs by implementing a crucial architectural component—the base stations on software defined radios (SDRs). We discuss our system design choices for spectrum sharing from multiple perspectives and then present the mechanisms for spectrum sharing and coexistence of GPRS+WiMAX and GPRS+WiFi as use cases, respectively. Simulations were carried out to prove that spectrum access scheduling is an alternative, feasible, and promising approach to the spectrum scarcity problem.