A Price Based Spectrum Sharing Scheme in Wireless Cellular Networks

Radio frequency spectrum scarcity has become a high priority research area over the past few years. The huge increase of network subscribers with multimedia applications coupled with underutilization of radio frequency spectrum motivates the search for other measures to address the scarcity of radio frequency spectrum. This work investigates on a price based spectrum sharing scheme for connection-oriented traffic in wireless cellular networks as a solution to address the scarcity of radio frequency spectrum. Dynamic pricing approach is applied with traffic overflows into neighbor networks. Performance evaluations of the scheme at steady state using MATLAB simulations reveal significant gains to the quality of service. Application of the scheme to highly loaded network traffic improves both network revenue and traffic channel utilizations. Keywords ? Pricing, spectrum sharing, traffic overflows, Quality of service, channel utilizations, Wireless cellular networks.