Distributed bargaining mechanisms for multi-antenna dynamic spectrum access systems

Dynamic spectrum access and MIMO technologies are among the most promising solutions to address the ever increasing wireless traffic demand. An integration that successfully embraces the two is far from trivial due to the dynamics of spectrum opportunities as well as the requirement to jointly optimize both spectrum and spatial/antenna dimensions. Our objective in this paper is to jointly allocate opportunistic channels to various links such that no channel is allocated to more than one link, and to simultaneously optimize the MIMO precoding matrices under the Nash bargaining (NB) framework. We design a low-complexity distributed scheme that allows links to propose their minimum rate requirements, negotiate the channel allocation, and configure their precoding matrices. Simulations confirm the convergence of the distributed algorithm under timesharing to the globally optimal solution of the NB-based problem. They also show that the NB-based algorithm achieves much better fairness than purely maximizing network throughput.