Spatial Spectrum Reuse for Opportunistic Spectrum Access in Infrastructure-Based Systems

Opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) receives a constantly growing interest due to its potential to mitigate spectrum scarcity and meet the increasing communication needs of mobile users. OSA refers to identifying and exploiting spatiotemporal unused portions of licensed spectrum to allow communication among unlicensed–secondary users (SUs) without adverse impact to the licensees (primary users—PUs). Key parameters in OSA are the spectrum opportunities detection method used by the SUs, and the interference level perceived by the PUs. A spatial spectrum reuse framework is proposed, where broadcast messages of an infrastructure-based primary system are exploited and combined with location-aware methods to detect spectrum opportunities and establish interference-free secondary links. The study of secondary link establishment probabilities revealed a spectrum reuse of up to 25% for omni-directional and up to 90% for directional antennas. Moreover, increased throughput is achieved in both cases, with directional antennas attaining significantly better performance.