Dynamic user-centric spectrum handoff in 5G systems: Optimized criteria based resource management framework

The demand for spectrum resources has increased dramatically with the advent of modern wireless applications. Spectrum sharing, considered as a critical mechanism for 5G networks, is envisioned to address spectrum scarcity issue and achieve high data rate access, and guaranteed the quality of service (QoS). From the licensed network's perspective, the interference caused by all secondary users (SUs) should be minimized. From secondary networks point of view, there is a need to assign networks to SUs in such a way that overall interference is reduced, enabling the accommodation of a growing number of SUs. The potential solution for this problem is represented by spectrum handoff, which aims to help SUs to vacate the occupied licensed spectrum and find suitable network resources to resume the unfinished transmissions. Inspired by this, we process the performance analysis of different pricing strategies as Proposed Subscriber Class based Pricing (PSCP), Flexible Pricing (FP), Adaptive Pricing (AP) and QoS-DP in case of operator's profit and secondary users (SUs) satisfaction in different traffic load (TL). The simulation results prove that without considering SUs' attributes, although total network revenue (TNR) can be high, it causes to 'user churn' due to dissatisfaction with an allocated high price. The introduced optimal pricing strategy based on the SUs' attributes is related to QoS-Driven Pricing (DP). © 2017 IEEE.