Cognitive multihoming system for enhanced cellular experience

Abstract

Cellular network service providers are facing acute spectrum shortage due to surging mobile data traffic demand. On the contrary, spectrum measurement studies reveal that large part of the licensed spectrum is being underutilized. In this chapter, a cognitive multihoming (CM) framework is presented for the cellular network service providers to meet the escalating data demands and provide enhanced quality of service (QoS) to the users. In CM, the conventional cellular base stations (BS) are enabled with cognitive radio (CR) access functionality. Thus, these CR-enabled BS transmit simultaneously to the users over the licensed cellular bands as well as over the CR bands. Communication over CR incurs lower transmission cost at the expense of higher energy consumption due to frequent channel sensing. On the other hand, communication over licensed cellular bands is expensive due to its licensing premium. Performance of CM is analyzed in two scenarios. Multiple real-time (RT) and non-RT users requesting for unicast downlink content are considered in the first scenario, while the second scenario considers multiple users requesting for scalable video content from the network. For the two scenarios, optimal resource allocation and call admission control algorithm are presented. Through the performance results presented in this chapter, it is inferred that the CM strategy can enable the cellular network providers to serve a higher number of users as well as improve the user's QoS in terms of reduced service cost.