Context based Cognitive Radio for LTE-Advanced Networks

Abstract:
The fast growing number of smartphones and consequently the increasing amount of data will result in an always- growing demand for new spectrum. Since spectrum is a finite resource, there is a need to search for new concepts to split spectrum between different applications. Nowadays, the spectrum is organized in a fixed manner, which means every application has a specified frequency range. In order to avoid interference between applications a guard interval between two neighboring used frequency ranges is inserted. In this paper, we introduce an architecture, which enables an Authorized Shared Access (ASA), also as known as Licensed Shared Access (LSA), based spectrum management system in combination with cognitive radio (CR), and show the importance of context information. Furthermore we show an architecture which is able to share spectrum between the different LTE/LTE-Advanced operators. To deploy such a system, additional sensors (for cognitive radio), databases, and decision entities are needed. Information about the current usage status of a spectrum range, as well as spectrum usage rules (local and global) must be supervised and therefore a hierarchical distributed context management system will be introduced by this paper. Finally, we show the first measurement results of our context management architecture and discuss future work.