Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Joint Cooperative Spectrum Sensing and Channel Access in Cognitive UAV Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for distributed spectrum sensing and channel access in cognitive UAV networks, improving efficiency and stability without prior knowledge of primary user activity.

Contribution

It formulates a hybrid cooperative-competitive multi-agent RL problem and proposes a UCB-H and DDQN-based algorithm to solve it, addressing the curse of dimensionality.

Findings

Algorithms converge to stable strategies

Significant performance improvements over benchmarks

Effective handling of primary user activity uncertainty

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of distributed spectrum/channel access for cognitive radio-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (CUAVs) that overlay upon primary channels. Under the framework of cooperative spectrum sensing and opportunistic transmission, a one-shot optimization problem for channel allocation, aiming to maximize the expected cumulative weighted reward of multiple CUAVs, is formulated. To handle the uncertainty due to the lack of prior knowledge about the primary user activities as well as the lack of the channel-access coordinator, the original problem is cast into a competition and cooperation hybrid multi-agent reinforcement learning (CCH-MARL) problem in the framework of Markov game (MG). Then, a value-iteration-based RL algorithm, which features upper confidence bound-Hoeffding (UCB-H) strategy searching, is proposed by treating each CUAV as an independent learner (IL). To address the curse of dimensionality, the UCB-H strategy is further extended with a double deep Q-network (DDQN). Numerical simulations show that the proposed algorithms are able to efficiently converge to stable strategies, and significantly improve the network performance when compared with the benchmark algorithms such as the vanilla Q-learning and DDQN algorithms.