Distributed spectrum aggregation in cooperative networks

This paper proposes a modification in the distributed spectrum aggregation scheme presented in [1] to significantly improve its performance. The proposed scheme aggregates the 'common' idle bands between source and the participating relays instead of 'all' idle bands at the source as suggested in [1]. The earlier scheme fails if any of the idle bands at the source is unavailable across the relays. Nevertheless, the proposed scheme succeeds in this situation by aggregating the common idle bands only. If all idle bands of the source are available across the relays, both schemes are successful. Hence, the proposed scheme only fails in a rare event of no common idle bands. This reduces outage probability and improves channel capacity and bit error rate (BER) on average. We consider a more generalized Nakagami-m channel, which covers the Rayleigh channel used in [1]. Additionally, we extend the analysis from outage probability to BER and channel capacity. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the earlier scheme in terms of all major performance parameters.