Opportunistic Spectrum Access via Dynamic Resource Allocation

Recent advances in software defined radio and cognitive radio have given wireless devices the ability and opportunity to dynamically access spectrum, thereby potentially significantly improving spectrum efficiency and user performance. With this opportunity comes the challenge of effective resource allocation between probing/sensing channels to find out their availability and quality, and deciding which channels to use for data transmission.

In this talk we will discuss some of the unique technical constraints imposed by dynamic and opportunistic spectrum access, and their implications on mathematical modeling. We then present two specific formulations within such a multi-channel dynamic access context, one using a stochastic optimization framework and the other using a competitive analysis framework, respectively. We will show the structural properties of the optimal policies obtained using such formulations along with numerical results.