G.C. Manna

By Neeta Nathani and G. C. Manna

Current wireless networks are characterized by a static spectrum allocation policy, where governmental agencies assign wireless spectrum to license holders on a long-term basis for large geographical regions. The operators claim that the spectrum bands for mobile operation are highly occupied. Even then, a significant amount of licensed spectrum remains underutilized. Cognitive radio senses the radio environment with a twofold objective: identify those subbands of the radio spectrum that are underutilized by the primary (i.e., legacy) users and providing the means for making those bands available for employment by secondary (i.e., unlicensed) users. For unlicensed communication, the Quality of Service parameters need to be considered. Quality of Service comprises of channel availability, accessibility, and maintainability. Assessment of vacant channels of licensed band in a geographical region is termed as availability. An analysis of the collected data lead to arrive at the conclusion that more than one-eighth part of resources of each band are nearly permanently vacant, which is enough to design in-band common control signaling methods for cognitive radio. Measurement result plot of vacant channels in cities with known population will help to assess availability of vacant channels for any city and hence, measurement complexity can be avoided. The strategy to occupy the vacant channels without disturbing the primary user operation is referred as accessibility (or selection). Accessibility of a channel is dependent on blocking probability (or Quality of Service) measured in duration of minutes instead of hours. Instantaneous blocking probability has been calculated based on current minute occupancy for all available channels as reference. A comprehensive prediction model is employed in the proposed work to compute the instantaneous blocking probability both on immediate minute occupancy basis and its preceding 60 min basis from time of request by SU. Validation through actual data establishes that channelized blocking probability estimation model has lower error value compared to estimation through prediction models of other researchers. It was also observed that hourly basis prediction model has constant blocking probability value during clock hour, whereas minutewise Grade of Service (GoS) prediction model addresses the local peak demand and hence leads to a stringent GoS estimation. On secondary user request for vacant channel, the cognitive radio network needs to evaluate the expected holding time of the particular Secondary User and to ensure channel maintainability (or allocation), and it shall predict that the allotted channel shall be able to provide interruption-free service for holding time duration. Minutewise channel occupancy traffic is bumpy in nature; hence, the present work predicts call arrival rate using Holt Winter’s method. Also, at the instant of SU channel request, the channel allocation processor inputs all PU channel status minutewise, calculates actual mean residual lifetime (MRL) in minutes for each vacant channel and selects the channel with highest predicted free time. A simulation program runs on data collected from mobile switch of cellular network, which creates pseudo-live environment for channel allocation. The present work has compared the mean residual lifetime (MRL) method with the other researchers using probabilistic method of channel allocation and MRL method has been established as more accurate. The selection and allocation process with defined blocking probability model has been verified retrieving big data from data warehouse.

Part of the book: Cognitive Radio in 4G/5G Wireless Communication Systems