Distributed multiple access in multichannel cognitive radio networks via potential games

Cognitive Radio (CR) approaches constitute one of the most promising ways to solve the inefficiency of the static spectrum allocation procedures. Distributed and self-enforcing methods for multiple access/allocation have also become increasingly attractive for their scalability and robustness. In the light of this reality, we present in this work a game-based distributed algorithm for the multiple access of secondary users (SUs) in a multichannel CR environment. The main idea behind our method is to provide means for SUs to independently select a set of secondary channels to use for transmission, while achieving close-to-optimal equilibrium performance in a Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) regime. Additionally, we analytically derive explicit performance bounds on the optimality and the convergence speed of the proposed algorithm. We corroborate the efficacy of our multiple access algorithm as well as the main conclusions on the optimality/convergence speed tradeoff through numerical results.