A dynamic spectrum management framework for efficient TVWS exploitation

This paper elaborates on a prototype spectrum management framework, for dynamic exploitation of underused radio spectrum, such as TV White Spaces (TVWS), QoS provisioning and policy management, under the real time secondary spectrum market policy. The proposed framework is applied in a centralised Cognitive Radio (CR) network architecture, where the exploitation of the available TVWS, as well as the administration of the economic transactions is orchestrated via a Spectrum Broker. Towards efficiently exploiting TVWS, a fixed-price algorithm is proposed that coordinates the available resources among Secondary Systems, in terms of maximum possible TVWS utilisation and minimum frequency fragmentation. Furthermore, an auction-based algorithm is proposed that considers both frequency and time domain during TVWS allocation process, where maximum payoff of Spectrum Broker is the optimization target. Experimental tests that were carried-out under controlled conditions environment, verified the validity of the proposed framework, besides identifying fields for further research.