Fundamental limits of spectrum-sharing in fading environments

Traditionally, the frequency spectrum is licensed to users by government agencies in a rigid manner where the licensee has the exclusive right to access the allocated band. Therefore, licensees are protected from any interference all the time. From a practical standpoint, however, an unlicensed (secondary) user may share a frequency band with its licensed (primary) owner as long as the interference it incurs is not deemed harmful by the licensee. In a fading environment, a secondary user may take advantage of this fact by opportunistically transmitting with high power when its signal, as received by the licensed receiver, is deeply faded. In this paper we investigate the capacity gains offered by this dynamic…