Dynamic Deployment of Small Cells in TV White Spaces

Abstract

The operation of small cells in TV white spaces (TVWSs) represents a coexistence challenge due to their unplanned deployment, their heterogeneous transmission technologies, and the scarcity of TVWS channels in crowded cities. Whenever a new small cell is switched on, a spectrum reassignment of already-deployed small cells can be used to avoid high interference and enable coexistence. However, as users may turn on and off their small cells at times, these reassignments may lead to frequent reconfigurations of already-deployed small cells. For this reason, a solution named small-cell dynamic deployment (SCDD) is designed to reassign TVWS channels only to the small cells in the neighborhood of the new cell. A channel allocation is proposed for SCDD formulated as an exact potential game. Its exact potential function is the sum of the average capacity of the small cells considered in the game. Results show that SCDD requires a few channel reconfigurations of already-deployed small cells because the channel assignment outside the neighborhood of the new cell remains unchanged. However, SCDD performs similarly to the case in which the allocation may modify the channels of all small cells already deployed.