THE JOURNAL OF CHINA UNIVERSITIES OF POSTS AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2007
CHEN Jie, ZHANG Ping
Inter-operator spectrum sharing scheme for reconfigurable
system
CLC number TN929.5 Document A Article ID 1005-8885 (2007) 03-0056-07
Abstract Bargaining based mechanism for sharing spectrum
between radio access networks (RANs) belonging to multi-
operators is studied, to improve spectrum utilization efficiency
and maximize network revenue. By introducing an intelligent
agent, each RAN has the ability, which includes trading
information exchanging, final decision making, and so on, to
trade the spectrum with other RANs. The proposed
inter-operator spectrum sharing mechanism is modeled as an
infinite-horizon bargaining game with incomplete information,
and the resulting bargaining game has unique sequential
equilibrium. Consequently, the implementation is refined based
on the analysis. Simulation results show that the proposed
mechanism outperforms the conventional fixed spectrum
management (FSM) method in network revenue, spectrum
efficiency, and call blocking rate.
Keywords bargaining game with incomplete information,
dynamic spectrum management, inter-operator spectrum
sharing, reconfigurable system
1 Introduction
Today’s wireless networks are regulated by a fixed spectrum
allocation method, that is, the spectrum is regulated by
governmental agencies and is allocated to license holders or
operators on a long-term basis, for large geographical regions.
However, the fixed allocation of the spectrum might not
always provide the optimal spectrum efficiency in the future
reconfigurable multi-radio environment, with traffic loads
varying spatially and temporally. In addition, the growing
demand for wireless mobile multimedia services, and hence
increased traffic capacity, highlights a need for more
flexibility in terms of spectrum allocation and coordination
among multi-radio access networks (RANs). How to maximize
the spectrum efficiency to provide as many services as
possible and maximize the profits of networks poses a great
challenge.
Received date: 2007-03-28
CHEN Jie ( ), ZHANG Ping
Wireless Technology Innovation Institute, Beijing University of Posts and
Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
E-mail: jie.chen.bupt@gmail.com
In recent times, considering the scarcity and high economic
value of the spectrum, worldwide research efforts have been
made in dynamic spectrum management (DSM) [1]. Several
mechanisms have been proposed, to enhance the efficiency of
spectrum utilization, that is, the European research project
DRiVE and OverDRiVE [1]. With the rapid development of
software defined radio (SDR) and the introduction of recon-
figuration concepts [2], DSM no longer remains a utopia, but
becomes a reality. However, among all the contributions
above, as well as other works, few efforts have previously
been made on the potential of win–win solutions between
RAN’s spectrum efficiency and the RAN’s profits.
As a promising solution to DSM, the spectrum sharing
scheme is receiving more and more attention [3, 4]. Miao et al.
[3] proposed a spectrum sharing mechanism for RANs.
However, because the method requires all RANs’ private
information to be common knowledge to each other, this
mechanism is more suitable for those RANs belonging to a
single operator. To facilitate spectrum sharing between RANs
belonging to different operators, in this article, a bargaining
scheme to negotiate over the price of a traded spectrum block
is proposed. This negotiation procedure can be modeled as an
infinite-horizon bargaining game with a one-sided uncertainty.
As this game has unique sequential equilibrium, the optimized
implementation of the negotiation procedure is proposed.
Through extensive simulations, the results show that the
proposed scheme is definitely effective in improving the
spectrum efficiency, even as it increases the RANs’ revenue.
The rest of this article is organized as follows. It begins in
Sect. 2 by presenting the system model for spectrum trading. On
the basis of the bargaining game theory, the spectrum sharing
scheme between inter-operator RANs are proposed in Sect. 3.
Ample simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed
schemes in Sect. 4. Finally, Section 5 concludes the whole article.
2 System model
2.1 Spectrum sharing architecture
The architecture proposed for inter-operator spectrum sharing
is shown in Fig. 1. Virtual spectrum market (VSM), which