Decentralized dynamic spectrum access for cognitive radios: cooperative design of a non-cooperative game

Abstract

We consider dynamic spectrum access among cognitive radios from an adaptive, game theoretic learning perspective. Spectrum-agile cognitive radios compete for channels temporarily vacated by licensed primary users in order to satisfy their own demands while minimizing interference. For both slowly varying primary user activity and slowly varying statistics of "fast" primary user activity, we apply an adaptive regret based learning procedure which tracks the set of correlated equilibria of the game, treated as a distributed stochastic approximation. This procedure is shown to perform very well compared with other similar adaptive algorithms. We also estimate channel contention for a simple CSMA channel sharing scheme.