Spectrum Sharing Through Beacons

Control Plane for Spectrum Access and Mobility in Cognitive Radio Networks with Heterogeneous Frequency Devices

“…The utilization of beacons was suggested as a solution for spectrum access by using these beacons to control the medium access of the network devices into the frequency bands (Hulbert, 2005). Architectures with more than one beacon have been proposed to improve performance (Mangold et al, 2006).…”

Spectrum Awareness: Techniques and Challenges for Active Spectrum Sensing

“…A beacon can either grant permission to access the spectrum or deny access [24], [33]. The beaconing approach eliminates the need for detection and prediction of spectrum opportunities by cognitive radios.…”

“…The spectrum sensing chip presented in [38] can achieve a scanning speed 18 GHz/s with 100 kHz resolution, requiring for instance only 27.8 ms to estimate the spectrum use pattern in a 200 MHz bandwidth. Beacon approaches also acquires spectral information rapidly [24]. If we need to exploit very short available periods in the loaded licensed spectrum, for example, to transmit an emergency message, rapid methods are required.…”

“…Active sensing methods can operate in a distributed fashion as well [7]. The beacon approach presented in [24] can be distributed and secondary users may locally exploit available resources obtained via the beacon signals. The advantage of distributed approaches is the flexibility, which helps especially in spectrum sharing with other secondary systems [33].…”

“…This approach, however, requires a fixed supporting infrastructure for sensing, therefore limiting the possibilities to use the cognitive radio system everywhere. In [24] a beacon-based technique was proposed to alleviate the in situ problem. Primary receivers send beacons to inform SUs about frequencies they use.…”