How does the quality of information about past channel activity affect the secondary users´ long-term individual throughput? Researchers from CTVR Telecommunications Research Center at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, and from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech in the USA are trying to find an answer by analysing the impact of imperfect information on the performance of autonomous attempts of secondary users to opportunistically exploit spectrum resources. The work of Ji Wang, Irene Macaluso and Luiz A. daSilva is the first research project that devises channel selection strategies for secondary users under perfect monitoring and imperfect monitoring scenarios for homogenous channel occupancy.
Their theoretical findings have shown that both perfect and imperfect monitoring strategies converge to a static orthogonal allocation of the channels. The simulation results proved that under imperfect monitoring, the ambiguity about the type of activity observed in the channels reduced the rate of convergence, and the performance loss depended on the level of primary user activity, and the amount of competition between secondary users.
In future research, the team is planning to focus on the imperfect monitoring channel selection strategy design for non-homogenous channel occupancy.
The research was presented at CROWNCOM 2014, and the full paper is available here.
