Abstract
The rapid growth of wireless services and the breakneck proliferation of wireless devices continue to strain limited spectrum resource. While the need for efficient spectrum sharing mechanisms has been emphasized, opportunistic spectrum access has been considered as a promising mechanism for dynamic spectrum sharing. However, although the idle spectrum could exist, it is usually rather fragmented and distributed, and hence the secondary network users would face the difficulty in finding required contiguous spectrum. Spectrum aggregation can be exploited to provide effective wide bandwidth communication but at the cost of complexity and overhead. When a primary network uses spectrum dynamically, from the nature of opportunistic spectrum access, collisions can occur between primary and secondary transmissions and spectrum handoff can be utilised to provide reliable communication. However, collision occurrence results in spectrum handoff delay in a secondary network user (SU) along with short-term interference to a primary network user (PU). As a SU accesses more spectrum for higher data rates by spectrum aggregation, collisions can occur more frequently and frequent spectrum handoff will be required. While spectrum aggregation will allow the SU to have high flexibility in spectrum use and spectrum handoff can help improve the reliability of secondary transmissions, the SU faces a new spectrum allocation problem: How wide and which parts of spectrum opportunities should be aggregated while considering the complexity and the overhead for aggregation and for spectrum handoff? This thesis addresses the key challenge of opportunistic spectrum access, focusing on efficient spectrum sharing considering the fragmentation of spectrum opportunities in frequency and time domains. First, considering complexity and overhead for aggregation, the spectrum aggregation approach is investigated and guidelines are derived how to reduce spectrum fragmentation for the efficient spectrum utilisation based on simulation results. Second, the relationship between collision occurrence and spectrum aggregation is analysed. Collision probabilities between primary and secondary transmissions are derived and the impacts of spectrum aggregation on data rates and spectrum handoff are investigated. Then, a spectrum aggregation algorithm is proposed to maximise data rates for a given collision probability threshold. Third, when considering spectrum handoff, the impacts of spectrum aggregation on spectrum handoff and short-term interference to PUs are analysed. Then, the spectrum aggregation algorithm is designed with the aim to minimise collision. Finally, the results of this study are summarised, conclusions are presented and a number of future research topics are proposed.