A Stable Polygamy Approach to Spectrum Access with Channel Reuse

TL;DR

This paper extends the stable marriage problem to a polygamous setting for spectrum access, allowing multiple users per channel with constraints, and develops efficient algorithms for this broader model.

Contribution

It introduces the stable polygamy problem (SPP), a new formulation that enables channel reuse in spectrum access, and provides polynomial-time algorithms for specific cases.

Findings

Algorithms efficiently solve SPP with common utility.

Effective solutions for SPP with preference ranking in certain graph structures.

Simulation confirms algorithm efficiency in spectrum scenarios.

Abstract

We introduce a new and broader formulation of the stable marriage problem (SMP), called the stable polygamy problem (SPP), where multiple individuals from a larger group $L$ of $|L|$ individuals can be matched with a single individual from a smaller group $S$ of $|S|$ individuals. Each individual $\ell \in L$ possesses a social constraint set $C_{\ell}$ that contains a subset of $L$ with whom they cannot coexist harmoniously. We define a generalized concept of stability based on the preference and constraints of the individuals. We explore two common settings: common utility, where the utility of a match is the same for individuals from both sets, and preference ranking, where each individual has a preference ranking for every other individual in the opposite set. Our analysis is conducted using a novel graph-theoretical framework. The classic SMP has been investigated in recent years for spectrum access to match cells or users to channels, where only one-to-one matching is allowed. By contrast, the new SPP formulation allows us to solve more general models with channel reuse, where multiple users may access the same channel simultaneously. Interestingly, we show that classic algorithms, such as propose and reject (P&R), and Hungarian method are no longer efficient in the polygamy setting. We develop efficient algorithms to solve the SPP in polynomial time, tailored for implementations in spectrum access with channel reuse. We analytically show that our algorithm always solves the SPP with common utility. While the SPP with preference ranking cannot be solved by any algorithm in all cases, we prove that our algorithm effectively solves it in specific graph structures representing strong and weak interference regimes. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms across various spectrum access scenarios.