Distributed spectrum sharing policies for selfish users with imperfect monitoring ability

We develop a novel design framework for distributed spectrum sharing among secondary users (SUs), each one of which adjusts its power level to maximize its own payoff (e.g. throughput) while satisfying the interference temperature constraints imposed by primary users. Since the SUs can coexist in the system for a long time, we propose spectrum sharing policies that allow users to transmit in a time-division multiple-access (TDMA) fashion. In the presence of strong multi-user interference, our proposed TDMA policy outperforms existing spectrum sharing policies that dictate users to transmit at constant power levels simultaneously. Our proposed policy achieves Pareto optimality even when the SUs have limited and imperfect monitoring ability: they only observe whether the IT constraints are violated, and their observation is imperfect due to the erroneous measurements. In addition, our policy is deviation-proof, such that the autonomous users will find it in their self-interests to follow the policy. The policy can be implemented by the users in a distributed manner. Simulation results validate our analytical results and quantify the performance gains enabled by the proposed spectrum sharing policies.