Tunable Probing: Towards Timely Channel Selection Mechanism in Dynamic Multi-channel Wireless Networks

Optimal spectrum access is a fundamental issue for efficient wireless communications in multi-channel wireless networking systems. Opportunistic spectrum access, making fully use of channels with high quality, could pave a way for efficient transmission. Unfortunately, in heterogeneous wireless networks, these strategies suffer from the assumption of identical wireless channel quality, and the difficulties lie in manipulating between multiple radios and channels. In this paper, we propose a cooperative and cognitive spectrum access algorithm, so as to build a timely and distributed multi-channel probing and access scheme in heterogeneous wireless network. In modeling the probing problem into a time-constrained knapsack problem, we propose an optimal access scheme considering both channel bandwidth and the probing time. Numerical results and simulation results show that, our proposed timely probing paradigm effectively improves network resource utilization with deadlines.