A novel spectrum sharing scheme for industrial cognitive radio networks: From collective motion perspective

Spectrum sharing is a promising technique responsible for providing efficient and fair spectrum allocation. Considering the unevenness phenomenon of spectrum usage in industrial wireless networks, a novel spectrum sharing scheme, in the framework of industrial cognitive radio network (ICRN), is proposed in this paper via an autonomous switching technique to equalize the spectrum usage and increase the spectrum access possibility of new requests. The autonomous switching technique borrows the idea from the fact that specific collective motion can be achieved by local actions of individuals in many biological systems. The accessed nodes sense the limited spectrum range around their central frequency and then make the decision of channel switching autonomously. Several sensing report based rules are presented to facilitate the switching decision in order to equalize the channel usage among the sensing range of each node. It is demonstrated that by using these rules the spectrum usage becomes more even, and thus the spectrum utilization and fairness are both improved. Numerical examples are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed spectrum sharing scheme.