Improving Spectral Efficiency of Wireless Networks through Democratic Spectrum Sharing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a democratic spectrum sharing algorithm that enhances spectral efficiency and fairness in wireless networks by enabling distributed resource sharing among devices, validated through real-world and synthetic network experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel distributed spectrum sharing algorithm inspired by globalization principles, improving throughput, spectral efficiency, and fairness without extra resources.

Findings

DSS achieves ~60% throughput gain

DSS improves area spectral efficiency by ~50%

DSS increases fairness in data rate distribution by ~20%

Abstract

Wireless devices need spectrum to communicate. With the increase in the number of devices competing for the same spectrum, it has become nearly impossible to support the throughput requirements of all the devices through current spectrum sharing methods. In this work, we look at the problem of spectrum resource contention fundamentally, taking inspiration from the principles of globalization. We develop a distributed algorithm whereby the wireless nodes democratically share the spectrum resources and improve their spectral efficiency and throughput without additional power or spectrum resources. We validate the performance of our proposed democratic spectrum sharing (DSS) algorithm over real-world Wi-Fi networks and on synthetically generated networks with varying design parameters. Compared to the greedy approach, DSS achieves significant gains in throughput (~60%), area spectral efficiency ($\sim$50\%) and fairness in datarate distribution (~20%). Due to the distributed nature of the proposed algorithm, we can apply it to wireless networks of any size and density.