Spectrum agile radio: capacity and QoS implications of dynamic spectrum assignment

Abstract

Radio spectrum is very scarce today because a considerable amount of the spectrum is set aside for licensed wireless applications. With the rapid growth of wireless technologies, spectrum scarcity has become a serious problem as more and more wireless applications compete for very little spectrum. On the other hand the licensed spectrum allocated to applications like television, cellular telephony and public safety show very little usage over time at different geographical locations. The evolution of newer technologies has been seriously impaired because of current regulatory constraints on the operation of these networks in licensed spectrum, such as TV bands, and is being addressed by FCC through its recent rule making. With the goal of ubiquitous communication in mind, we look into spectrum agile radio, a new technology enabled by such FCC rule making, and study its advantages over conventional radios. In this paper, we first show the utilization achievable by agile radios through simple analysis. Then we will outline two types of agile radios and derive their maximum capacities. Then we will go ahead and derive the rules that increase the spectrum utilization using agile radios. We then highlight how spectrum agile radio impacts quality of service as defined in conventional sense