QoS-Aware Joint Policies in Cognitive Radio Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using Dec-POMDP to develop joint sensing policies for multiple secondary users in cognitive radio networks, ensuring QoS and maximizing throughput.

Contribution

It presents a tractable approach to find joint policies that guarantee QoS and optimize network throughput in multi-user cognitive radio scenarios.

Findings

Optimal joint policies for large horizons are achievable with the proposed method.

A joint policy satisfying QoS constraints exists under the model.

The method outperforms existing approaches in network throughput.

Abstract

One of the most challenging problems in Opportunistic Spectrum Access (OSA) is to design channel sensing-based protocol in multi secondary users (SUs) network. Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for SUs have significant implications on this protocol design. In this paper, we propose a new method to find joint policies for SUs which not only guarantees QoS requirements but also maximizes network throughput. We use Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP) to formulate interactions between SUs. Meanwhile, a tractable approach for Dec-POMDP is utilized to extract sub-optimum joint policies for large horizons. Among these policies, the joint policy which guarantees QoS requirements is selected as the joint sensing strategy for SUs. To show the efficiency of the proposed method, we consider two SUs trying to access two-channel primary users (PUs) network modeled by discrete Markov chains. Simulations demonstrate three interesting findings: 1- Optimum joint policies for large horizons can be obtained using the proposed method. 2- There exists a joint policy for the assumed QoS constraints. 3- Our method outperforms other related works in terms of network throughput.