Imitative spectrum access

In this paper, we study how secondary users can share the spectrum in a distributed fashion based on imitations. We propose an imitative spectrum access mechanism, where each secondary user estimates its expected throughput based on local observations, and imitates the channel selection of another 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 when the number of users is large, the imitative spectrum access mechanism can converge to a Nash equilibrium, which is a special case of the imitation equilibrium.