Physical Communication
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/phycom
article
Keywords:
Cognitive radio
Spectrum hole
Capacity
Achievable rate
info
a b s t r a c t
Cognitive radio is a new concept of reusing a licensed spectrum in an unlicensed manner.
The motivation for cognitive radio is various measurements of spectrum utilization, that
generally show unused resources in frequency, time and space. These spectrum holes
could be exploited by cognitive radios. Some studies suggest that the spectrum is extremely
underutilized, and that these spectrum holes could provide ten times the capacity of all
existing wireless devices together. The spectrum could be reused either during time periods
where the primary system is not active, or in geographical positions where the primary
system is not operating. In this paper, we deal primarily with the concept of geographical
reuse, in a frequency-planned primary network. We perform an analysis of the potential for
communication in a geographical spectrum hole, and in particular the achievable sum-rate
for a secondary network, to some order of magnitude.
Simulation results show that a substantial sum-rate could be achieved if the secondary
users communicate over small distances. For a small number of secondary links, the sumrate increases linearly with the number of links. However, the spectrum hole gets saturated
quite fast, due to interference caused by the secondary users. A spectrum hole may look
large, but it disappears as soon as someone starts using it.
2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
A spectrum is a scarce resource, and operators have
made huge financial investments to buy licensed spectrums. The licensed spectrum is intended for specific communication technologies, and no one but the spectrum
owner is allowed to use it. Cognitive radio is a new concept
of reusing a licensed spectrum in an unlicensed manner
I Invited Paper.
II The research leading to these results has received funding from
the European Communitys Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/20072013) under grant agreement no. 216076. This work was also supported
in part by the Swedish Research Council (VR), the Swedish Foundation for
Strategic Research (SSF), and the CENIIT foundation. E. Larsson is a Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA) Research Fellow supported by a grant
from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
Corresponding author. Tel.: +46 0 13 281350.
E-mail addresses: axell@isy.liu.se (E. Axell), erik.larsson@isy.liu.se
(E.G. Larsson), danyo@isy.liu.se (D. Danev).
1874-4907/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.phycom.2009.03.002
[13]. The motivation for cognitive radio is various measurements of spectrum utilization, that generally show unused resources in frequency, time and space [4,5]. These
spectrum holes could be exploited by cognitive radios.
The spectrum could be reused either during time periods
where the primary system is not active, or in geographical
positions where the primary system is not operating. This
paper deals primarily with geographical, or spatial, reuse.
The introduction of cognitive radios, sometimes called
secondary users, in an existing primary system will create
interference and thus a quality degradation of the primary
system. In order to reduce the impact on the primary
system, cognitive radios have to sense the spectrum and
detect whether there are primary users in the vicinity
that are currently using the spectrum. The cognitive radios
need to be positioned sufficiently far away from the
primary users and transmit at very low power levels.
This has been analyzed in, e.g. [6] for a single cell, and
in [7] for a frequency-planned network. It is unavoidable
(x) =
x
x0
10 /10 ,
N (0, )
written as Pc
k6=i (|Ri Tk |). The secondary users also
receive interfering signals from the primary base stations.
The interference power from the primary system, for the
P6
ith secondary user, can be written as P n=0 (|Ri Bn |).
Now the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for
the ith cognitive receiver becomes
Pc (d0 )
SINRi =
2 + Pc
(|Ri Tk |) + P
(|Ri Bn |)
(d0 )
=
Pc
2. Model
6
P
n =0
k6=i
We consider the downlink in a hexagonal frequencyplanned network, shown in Fig. 1. We include the main
primary base station and the first tier of co-channel
interferers. The cell radius is r, and the distance
to the first
P
k6=i
(|Ri Tk |) +
P
Pc
6
P
,
(|Ri Bn |)
n =0
6
P
(d0 )
"
,E
6
X
=
log2 1 +
i=1
#
(|(r cos(), r sin()) Bn |) ,
n=1
(d0 )
SINRi =
N
(|Ri Tk |) +
k6=i
6
P
.
(|Ri Bn |)
n=0
= log2 1 +
(d0 )
N
P
k6=i
(|Ri Tk |) +
(|Ri Bn |)
Ci
(|Ri Tk |) +
k6=i
6
P
(|Ri Bn |)
n=0
(D d)2 d2
D2
=12 .
D
n=0
(bits/s/Hz).
C =
where
90
Table 1
Parameter values used in the simulations for n = 7, 21 and = 10 dB,
obtained from Fig. 3 in [7].
1
0
0
25
3
5
((D d)2 d2 )X + d2 ,
60
50
i = 1, 2, . . . , N ,
1 bit/s/Hz/link
40
30
20
10
0
70
50
12
20
sumrate [bits/s/Hz]
A (%)
(n = 21) (dB)
(n = 7) (dB)
A=50%, =12dB
A=25%, =3dB
A=1%, =0dB
80
50
100
150
200
Number of secondary links
250
300
Fig. 2. Total achievable sum-rate for the secondary system for d0 = 0.1r,
= 4, = 6 dB, n = 21.
500
n=21
n=7
450
Table 2
Effective area for n = 21, d0 = 0.1 r.
A (%)
Nmax
AE (%)
400
sumrate [bits/s/Hz]
350
1
12
19
25
86
5
50
220
7
300
250
200
150
100
1 bit/s/Hz/link
50
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
Nmax d20
AD2
Nmax d20
3nr 2 A
4. Point-to-point improvement
The simulations in Section 3 show that the achievable
sum-rate is strongly dependent on the transmission
distance d0 . A small distance yields a larger received
signal strength for the secondary users and thus a larger
achievable rate. This also leads us to another interesting
question. Suppose that we want to communicate between
a point A and another point B separated by a distance ,
and using power Ptot . We neglect shadow fading, i.e. the
channel gain at a distance x is simply (x) = ( xx ) . The
0
achievable rate would then be
Ptot (/x0 )
C = log2
1+
(1)
Mx0
.
250
200
sumrate [bits/s/Hz]
M=1
M=2
M=10
Ck =
150
1 bit/s/Hz/link
100
50
50
100
150
200
Number of secondary links
250
300
log2 1 +
Ptot
M /T
Mx0
[bits/s/Hz],
J + Ik
C =
C =
1
M
1
M
log2 1 +
log2
1+
Ptot
J
Ptot (/x0 )
J
(bits/s/Hz).
(2)
M /T k:k1 (mod T ) T
M /T 1
Mx0
1 X
M
m=0
log2 1 +
log2 1 +
Ptot
M /T
Ptot
M /T
Mx0
J + Ik
Mx0
J + ImT +1
(bits/s/Hz). (3)
Ptot
M /T
+
Mx0
Ptot
M /T
Mx0
Similarly
I4 =
Ptot
M /T
+
Mx0
Ptot
M /T
Mx0
and
I7 =
Ptot
M /T
7
Mx0
+
Ptot
M /T
4
Mx0
6
M=1
M=9, T=9
M=9, T=3
5
4
3
2
1
0
15
10
10
15
Ptot/J [dB]
Fig. 6. Comparison of the point-to-point achievable rate using either
direct transmission, 9 time division multiplexed repeater devices, or 9
repeater devices of which 3 transmit simultaneously.
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