Enabling Secondary Access Through Robust Primary User Channel Assignment

A common concept to mitigate the effects of spectrum scarcity is to allow opportunistic Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) to licensed frequency bands. In this paper, the license holder may experience a decrease in the performance of its network. For cellular networks this may lead to unwanted coverage holes at locations where the secondary-induced interference is too strong. In this paper, the authors propose a planning tool and a channel assignment mechanism for cellular OFDMA-based networks that takes the coverage requirements of the primary system into account. By keeping a dynamic reserve of channels for those nodes that experience the highest interference, they can maximize spectrum utilization while guaranteeing a predefined service reliability.