Imitation-based Social Spectrum Sharing

TL;DR

This paper proposes an imitation-based distributed spectrum sharing mechanism that leverages social information sharing among secondary users to improve spectrum utilization and fairness with low computational complexity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel social imitation mechanism and an information sharing graph for distributed spectrum access, ensuring convergence to an efficient equilibrium.

Findings

Achieves efficient spectrum utilization.

Provides good fairness among secondary users.

Converges to an imitation equilibrium.

Abstract

Dynamic spectrum sharing is a promising technology for improving the spectrum utilization. In this paper, we study how secondary users can share the spectrum in a distributed fashion based on social imitations. The imitation-based mechanism leverages the social intelligence of the secondary user crowd and only requires a low computational power for each individual user. We introduce the information sharing graph to model the social information sharing relationship among the secondary users. We propose an imitative spectrum access mechanism on a general information sharing graph such that each secondary user first estimates its expected throughput based on local observations, and then imitates the channel selection of another neighboring user who achieves a higher throughput. We show that the imitative spectrum access mechanism converges to an imitation equilibrium, where no beneficial imitation can be further carried out on the time average. Numerical results show that the imitative spectrum access mechanism can achieve efficient spectrum utilization and meanwhile provide good fairness across secondary users.