A Micro-Finance Model for Spectrum Management in Wireless Networks

• Published in: IEEE transactions on cognitive communications and networking 2016-09, Vol.2 (3), p.263-272
• Main Authors: Anand, S., Chandramouli, Rajarathnam
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Delays; Economics; Heterogeneous networks; micro-finance; Numerical models; Pricing; Resource management; spectrum allocation; Wireless networks
• ISSN: 2332-7731; 2332-7731
• DOI: 10.1109/TCCN.2016.2601305

This paper incorporates the idea of micro-financing into bandwidth allocation in wireless networks. Resource allocation in heterogeneous wireless networks has been widely studied from the perspective of maximizing the system utilization or maximizing the carried traffic in the network. However, measurements show that the distribution of signal strength at different parts of a region is similar to the income distribution in an economic framework, wherein certain users are starved of spectrum causing "spectrum poverty" or "spectrum access poverty" to those users. This paper proposes a micro-finance model-based spectrum usage etiquette to help those with poor spectrum availability, loan spectrum from different service providers for small periods of time, and thus alleviate spectrum poverty. We price each user according to the credit history of the user. Results indicate micro-financing-based spectrum etiquette results in overall benefit for the entire system. Numerical results show 20-50% increase in the overall system utilization for the micro-finance model-based spectrum etiquette, compared to the traditional spectrum allocation model. Individually, the micro-finance model results in a 50-75% reduction in the new call blocking and 30-80% in call dropping performance for delay in-tolerant traffic and 25-50% reduction in the mean delay for delay tolerant traffic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research on micro-finance based spectrum etiquette to improve overall system performance.