A Framework for Resource Allocation in a Cognitive Digital Home

The advances in radio design and wireless networking, along with the growth of multimedia home entertainment technologies, is creating the concept of a cognitive digital home requiring spectrum coexistence of various devices and networks of networks. In this paper, we introduce a framework for resource allocation in a cognitive digital home with a multiplicity of radio access technologies such as cognitive radios and legacy technologies supporting heterogeneous applications. A spectrum manager, named the home genie node, is introduced to coordinate spectrum coexistence across different services, with degrees of freedom ranging from transmission parameters such as frequency, bandwidth, and power, to the choice of radio access technology itself. We study problems of sum rate maximization as well as maxmin rate allocation which are mixed integer nonlinear programs, and propose simple heuristic solutions for the same.