Cognitive Medium Access: Exploration, Exploitation, and Competition

By Lifeng Lai, Hesham El Gamal, Hai Jiang, H. Vincent Poor. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2007

353 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper considers the design of efficient strategies that allow cognitive users to choose frequency bands to sense and access among multiple bands with unknown parameters. First, the scenario in which a single cognitive user wishes to opportunistically exploit the availability of frequency bands is considered. By adopting tools from the classical bandit problem, optimal as well as low complexity asymptotically optimal solutions are developed. Next, the multiple cognitive user scenario is considered. The situation in which the availability probability of each channel is known is first considered. An optimal symmetric strategy that maximizes the total throughput of the cognitive users is developed. To avoid the possible selfish behavior of the cognitive users, a game-theoretic model is then developed. The performance of both models is characterized analytically. Then, the situation in which the availability probability of each channel is unknown a priori is considered. Low-complexity medium access protocols, which strike an optimal balance between exploration and exploitation in such competitive environments, are developed. The operating points of these low-complexity protocols are shown to converge to those of the scenario in which the availability probabilities are known. Finally, numerical results are provided to illustrate the impact of sensing errors and other practical considerations.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37e1a443005c6b6400ee44cf820e733edbe9e41a

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In Computer Networks and Communications

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Optimal selection of channel sensing order in cognitive radio (2009, background): “The availability of each channel is assumed to follow a Markov chain, whose transition matrix is known to secondary users.”
Advances in cognitive radio networks: A survey (2011, background): “Cognitive medium access has also been modeled as a multiarmed bandit problem in [109], and an efficient access strategy is developed that achieves a good balance between exploring the availability of other free bands and exploiting the opportunities that have been identified.”
On Upper-Confidence Bound Policies for Switching Bandit Problems (2011, background): “problem [19], a user wishes to opportunistically exploit the availability of an empty channel in a multiple channel system; the reward is the availability of the channel, whose distribution is unknown to the user.”