FSMA - A Topology-Transparent Scheme for Opportunistic Spectrum Access

With the advent of cognitive radio technology, new paradigms for spectrum access can achieve near-optimal spectrum utilization by letting users sense and utilize available spectrum opportunistically. Recently, graph-coloring models have been used to produce fair, efficient and optimal spectrum allocations for a given network topology. However, topology changes (e.g., due to user mobility) can incur significant signaling traffic to reallocate spectrum, consuming valuable resources. We propose a frequency-spread multiple access (FSMA) scheme that is topology-transparent, and numerical results suggest that it is suited for opportunistic spectrum access in a sparsely-connected, low-density mobile ad-hoc network.