UPS: A United Cooperative Paradigm for Primary and Secondary Networks

The dominant spectrum sharing paradigm of today is the interweave paradigm. This paper advocates a new and alternative paradigm called United network of Primary and Secondary networks (UPS). UPS allows a complete cooperation between primary and secondary networks at the node level to relay each other´s traffic, in addition to existing dynamic spectrum access (DSA) in time, space, and frequency domains. Such cooperation allows the primary and secondary networks to access a much richer network resources from the combined network. As a case study, we consider a problem with the goal of supporting the rate requirement of the primary network traffic while maximizing the minimum throughput of the secondary sessions. For this problem, we develop an optimization model and formulate a combinatorial optimization problem. Although this problem is in the form of mixed integer linear program (MILP), we can use CPLEX to solve it efficiently. Simulation results show that the UPS paradigm offers much better throughput performance than the interweave DSA paradigm.