Distributed design for fair coexistence in TVWS

Very recently, regulatory bodies worldwide started to approve the opportunistic access of unlicensed networks to the TVWS spectrum. Hence, in the near future, multiple heterogeneous and independently-operated unlicensed networks will coexist within the same geographical area over shared TVWS. Nevertheless, the coexistence among heterogeneous unlicensed networks over TVWS represents an open problem, and innovative solutions for handling the coexistence interference are needed to fully unleash the TVWS potentials. Hence, in this paper, we design a coexistence strategy for TVWS scenarios with the following attractive features: i) fully distributed, i.e., it avoids the need of centralized interference management; ii) over-the-air communications free, i.e., it avoids the need of direct communications among the heterogeneous networks; iii) adaptive to the time- and space-dynamics of the coexistence interference; iv) selfless, i.e., it allows a fair TVWS spectrum sharing by accounting for the communication demands of each unlicensed network. These attractive features are obtained by designing a coexistence strategy based on a system of multi-dimensional ordinary differential equations, and by incorporating the tradeoff between selfish bandwidth maximization and fair spectrum allocation within the system dynamics. Performance evaluation is conducted through numerical simulations, and the results confirm the attractive features of the proposed coexistence strategy.