Spectrum harvesting for heterogeneous wireless networks integration

Massive capacity demand is a major impetus behind the advances, in various ways, of today and near future wireless communication networks. To face this challenge, more wireless spectrum is needed, efficient usage of this spectrum is necessary, and adequate architectures are required. In this paper, we present a conceptual solution based on a cognitive-radio-inspired cellular network, for integrating idle spectrum resources of different wireless networks into a single mobile heterogeneous wireless network. We describe the conceptual architecture of this integrating network, referred to as Integrating cognitive-radio-inspired cellular network (I-CRICNet), and present a cooperative spectrum-harvesting scheme that keeps the former supplied with spectrum resources. In the latter scheme, we make extensive use of cross-correlated sequences (CSSs), for events signaling purposes. This choice is motived by the particularly interesting characteristics of the CSSs, namely, duration shortness, robustness to bad radio conditions, detection rather than decoding, and low probability of collision. As an illustration, we propose a reporting and detection scheme, in the context of OFDMA systems, and provide performance results from simulations to validate our proposal.