Cognitive Multihoming: Maximizing Network Utility over CR-Assisted Cellular Network

Demand for wireless data bandwidth has been increasing explosively so that the present licensed cellular networks (LCNs) themselves are no longer competent to provide high quality service to the users at a reasonable cost. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective system, called cognitive multihoming (CM), that enables high quality service and at the same time incurs low cost. The proposed system considers a cellular base station with added cognitive radio (CR) functionality. The heterogeneous resources are organized into a single centrally- managed virtual system to allocate the heterogeneous users with varying quality and cost constraints. Multiple multihoming-capable heterogeneous users request downlink unicast data from the system. Transmissions to these users are performed simultaneously via LCN and CR network (CRN). This cooperative approach aids lowering service cost to the users. The possibility of loss in quality of service is mitigated by optimally distributing the traffic load between LCN and CRN, based on the users´ rate requirements. To evaluate the CM performance we consider a benchmark system with the same total channel resource from LCN and CRN, where a user is served via either LCN or CRN depending on the users quality and cost preferences. Numerical results show that, on average the network utility of the proposed system is nearly 17% higher than the benchmark.