Spectrum management for small cell cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio technologies are commonly considered as an effective way to solve the problem that currently spectrum resource is almost used up. In this paper, by introducing the concept of small cells, we propose an optimal dynamic spectrum management scheme. To allocate the spare spectrum resources with the optimization objective, the system throughput, power consumption and the interference of users and other small cells are taken into account. Dynamic spectrum management is modeled as a restless bandits model, which has the indexability feature. To simplify the optimization problem, utilizing the indexability feature, simply selecting the cell with the smallest index value guarantees the optimality. Simulation results show that comparing with the existing methods, the optimal spectrum allocation method can significantly improve the system reward.