Software defined orchestrated spectrum sharing enabled by 3D interference map

Due to the increasing spectrum scarcity caused by data-consuming multimedia applications over mobile and smart devices, efficient utilization of radio spectrum has been receiving tremendous interest during the past decades. Previous spectrum sharing techniques using cognitive radio might cause mis-detection and performance degradation of the incumbent users due to the limited sensing capability of devices and lack of timely information exchange between co-existing heterogeneous networks (HetNets). In this paper, an orchestrated spectrum sharing approach that integrates the distributed located users, base stations (BS), incumbent stations, and the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller into an amalgamated network with real-time information exchange is introduced. In order to effectively protect incumbent users and efficiently share the pooled spectrum resources, real-time 3D interference map is considered to guide the spectrum access based on the SDN global view. MATLAB simulation is conducted to verify the performance improvement.