Multichannel Opportunistic Carrier Sensing for Stable Channel Access Control in Cognitive Radio Systems

In this paper we propose to use the well known game theoretic Gale-Shapley stable marriage theorem from game theory as a basis for spectrum allocation in cognitive radio networks. We analyze the performance of the proposed solution and provide tight lower and upper bounds on both the stable allocation and the optimal allocation performance. Then we present a novel opportunistic multichannel medium access control technique that achieves stable allocation within a single CSMA contention window. We discuss practical implementation issues and put forward two other varieties of the algorithm which have lower implementation complexity. Finally, we provide simulated examples.