A Novel Dynamic Spectrum-Sharing Method for Integrated Wireless Multimedia Sensors and Cognitive Satellite Networks

Abstract

With the growing demand, Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) play an increasingly important role, which enhances the capacity of typical Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Additionally, integrating satellite systems into WMSNs brings about the beneficial synergy, especially in rural and sparsely populated areas. However, the available spectrum resource is scarce, which contradicts the high-speed content required for multimedia. Cognitive radio is a promising solution to address the conflict. In this context, we propose a novel spectrum-sharing method for the integrated wireless multimedia sensor and cognitive satellite network based on the dynamic frequency allocation. Specifically, the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite system plays the role of the auxiliary to connect sensor nodes and the remote control host, and it shares the same frequency with the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) system in the downlink. Because the altitudes of GEO and LEO satellites differ greatly, the beam size of GEO is much larger than that of LEO, which provides the opportunity for LEO beam to reuse the frequency that was allocated to the GEO beam. A keep-out region is defined to guarantee the spectral coexistence based on the interference analysis in the worst case. In addition, a dynamic frequency allocation algorithm is presented to deal with the dynamic configuration caused by the satellite motion. Numerical results demonstrate that the dynamic spectrum-sharing method can improve the throughput.