Proportional Fair Power Allocation for Secondary Transmitters in the TV White Space

Abstract

The key bottleneck for secondary spectrum usage is the aggregate interference to the primary system receivers due to simultaneous secondary transmissions. Existing power allocation algorithms for multiple secondary transmitters in the TV white space either fail to protect the TV service in all cases or they allocate extremely low power levels to some of the transmitters. In this paper, we propose a power allocation algorithm that favors equally the secondary transmitters and it is able to protect the TV service in all cases. When the number of secondary transmitters is high, the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm becomes high too. We show how the algorithm could be modified to reduce its computational complexity at the cost of negligible performance loss. The modified algorithm could permit a spectrum allocation database to allocate near optimal transmit power levels to tens of thousands of secondary transmitters in real time. In addition, we describe how the modified algorithm could be applied to allow decentralized power allocation for mobile secondary transmitters. In that case, the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms because it allows reducing the communication signalling overhead between mobile secondary transmitters and the spectrum allocation database.