IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 13, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2014 1047
A Cooperative Matching Approach for
Resource Management in
Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks
Haibo Zhou, Student Member, IEEE, Bo Liu, Member, IEEE,
Yongkang Liu, Ning Zhang, Lin Gui, Member, IEEE,
Ying Li, Xuemin (Sherman) Shen, Fellow, IEEE ,andQuanYu
Abstract—Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) can be leveraged
by introducing external spectrum sensing for secondary users
(SUs) to overcome the hidden primary users (PUs) problem
and improve spectrum utilization. In this paper, we investigate
the DSA networks with external sensors, i.e., external sensing
agents, to utilize spectrum access opportunities located in cellular
frequency bands. Considering the diversity of SUs’ demands
and the secondary bandwidths discovered by external sensors,
it is critical to manage the detected spectrum resources in an
efficient way. To this end, we formulate the resource management
problem in the DSA networks as a dynamic resource demand-
supply matching problem, and propose a cooperative matching
solution. Specifically, spectrum access opportunities are classified
into two types by the resource block size: massive sized blocks
and small sized blocks. For the former type, SUs are encouraged
to share the whole time-frequency block via forming coalitional
groups with a “wholesale” sharing approach. For the latter type,
the resource “aggregation” sharing approach is proposed to meet
the time-frequency demand of individual SUs. To further reduce
the delay in the spectrum allocation and compress the matching
process, we develop a distributed fast spectrum sharing (DFSS)
algorithm, which can deal with both two aforementioned types
of resource sharing cases. Simulation results show that the DFSS
algorithm can adapt to the dynamic spectrum variations in the
DSA networks and the average utilization of detected spectrum
access opportunities reaches nearly 90%.
Index Terms—Dynamic spectrum access, cooperation, coali-
tion, matching, utilization maximization.
I. INTRODUCTION
C
URRENT static spectrum allocation policy has resulted
in inefficient spectrum utilization in the licensed spec-
trum bands [1]. To improve the spectrum utilization, the
cognitive radios (CR) empowered dynamic spectrum access
Manuscript received May 8, 2013; revised September 9, 2013; accepted
November 10, 2013. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper
and approving it for publication was M. Bennis.
H. Zhou, B. Liu, L. Gui, and Q. Yu are with the Depart-
ment of Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao T ong University, Shang-
hai, China, 200240 (e-mail: {haibozhou, liubo
lb, guilin}@sjtu.edu.cn,
yuquan@public3.bta.net.cn). B. Liu is the corresponding author.
Y. Liu, N. Zhang, and X. Shen are with the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West,
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1 (e-mail: yongkang.liu.phd@gmail.com,
n35zhang@uwaterloo.ca, xshen@bbcr.uwaterloo.ca).
Q. Yu is also with the China Electronic System Engineering Company,
Beijing, China, 100141; Y. Li is with the China Electronic System Engineering
Company, Beijing, China, 100141 (e-mail: liying8800@163.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TWC.2013.122413.130833
(DSA) technology allows the secondary users (SUs) to op-
portunistically exploit the unused spectrum resource that are
temporally released by primary users (PUs), which gains
growing attentions from both academia and industry [2][3][4].
Currently, most extensive research efforts have been made
to exploit the TV “white spectrum” for DSA, and among
them, a novel solution of radio environmental maps (REM) is
proposed in [5]. However, the recent investigations revealed
that the cellular bands have also shown the potential for DSA
implementation [6][7], where the SUs can use the temporally
unused time-frequency resources in cellular networks in an
opportunistic way. As discovered in [6], the cellular DSA
applications are promising and attractive in non-peak hours,
for example, the period of nights and weekends. Furthermore,
based on spectrum data mining technology, such as the fre-
quent pattern mining [7], the long-term spectral and temporal
state in cellular bands can be predicted with a prediction
accuracy higher than 95%, which motivates the study of DSA
technology in cellular bands.
In this paper, we first introduce an external sensor aided
dynamic spectrum access model in cellular networks, where
the external sensors, i.e., external sensing agents, can perform
cooperative spectrum sensing and supply flexible available
licensed spectrum resources in cellular networks to SUs with
different resource demands. Specifically, as the external sens-
ing agents can cooperatively sense the spectrum usage state
and process the collected sensing information in a distributed
way in the cellular n etworks, the realtime spectral-temporal
availabilities of spectrum resource in specific local cellular
networks can be acquired. Therefore, the SUs can request for
those time-frequency resources according to their own needs.
Those available time-frequency resources are referred to as
time-frequency blocks (TFBs), where one TFB is composed of
different number of resource block units in the cellular system
[8]. We then propose a set of resource management rules, and
model the dynamic spectrum sharing process as a cooperative
supply-demand matching problem, to match the dynamical
TFBs supplied by external sensing agents and various resource
demands of SUs. Considering the time-frequency variation
of detected resource blocks, those TFBs can be classified
into two types according to the TFBs size: massive sized
blocks and small sized blocks; and the “wholesale” sharing
and “aggregation” sharing approaches are proposed accord-
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2014 IEEE