Cooperative Spectrum Mobility in Heterogeneous Opportunistic Networks for IoT

With the advent of smarter technologies in LTE, often the bands used for lower technologies remain unoccupied in cellular networks (CN). To utilize those, in this paper, a new paradigm of cognitive radio has been proposed for IoT, where the nodes of a self-organized opportunistic ad hoc network, act as the secondary users (SU) to use the white spaces of the co-existing cellular network. Each SU of the ad hoc network, in a self-organized fashion, collaborates with other SUs to reduce the impact of cognitive users on the primary network and also to improve the performance of the ad hoc network. Since it does not require the control of the core network, the device to device communication proposed in 5G CN, also can apply this technique for sharing the cellular spectrum without the control of the core network. We have developed distributed algorithms for cooperative channel sharing to reduce the spectrum latency as well as to improve the channel utilization. The proposed algorithms not only improve the system performance in offloading the traffic but also reduce the control overhead of the backbone network. Simulation results show that the proposed cooperative techniques perform better in terms of channel utilization, energy-efficiency, and call block/drop rate with respect to other cooperative approaches with insignificant additional message overhead at users’ end.