Spectrum Sharing in Wireless Networks : Fairness, Efficiency, and Security

To date, commercial cellular networks and broadband providers have utilized dedicated spectrum to provide services. However, the growing difficulty in identifying new spectrum for the exclusive use of wireless networks and the length of time the reallocation process takes has precipitated a growing interest in using shared spectrum for offloading some broadband network traffic. This book covers various topics related to spectrum sharing including fairness, efficiency, and security. For each of those aspects, the authors provide models, algorithms, and protocols for next-generation spectrum-agile wireless networks.

Spectrum Sharing in Wireless Networks: Fairness, Efficiency, and Security provides a broad overview of wireless network spectrum sharing in seven distinct sections: The first section examines the big picture and basic principles, explaining the concepts of spectrum sharing, hardware/software function requirements for efficient sharing, and future trends of sharing strategies.

The second section contains more than 10 chapters that discuss differing approaches to efficient spectrum sharing. The authors introduce a new coexistence and sharing scheme for multi-hop networks, describe the space-time sharing concept, introduce LTE-U, and examine sharing in broadcast and unicast environments. They then talk about different cooperation strategies to achieve mutual benefits for primary users (PU) and secondary users (SU), discuss protocols in a spectrum sharing context, and provide different game theory models between PUs and SUs.

The third section explains how to model the interactions of PUs and SUs, using an efficient calculation method to determine spectrum availability. Additionally, this section explains how to use scheduling models to achieve efficient SU traffic delivery. The subject of the fourth section is MIMO-oriented design. It focuses on how directional antennas and MIMO antennas greatly enhance wireless network performance. The authors include a few chapters on capacity/rate calculations as well as beamforming issues under MIMO antennas.

Power control is covered in the fifth section which also describes the interference-aware power allocation schemes among cognitive radio users and the power control schemes in cognitive radios. The sixth section provides a comprehensive look at security issues, including different types of spectrum sharing attacks and threats as well as corresponding countermeasure schemes. The seventh and final section covers issues pertaining to military applications and examines how the military task protects its data flows when sharing the spectrum with civilian applications.