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Cognitive Medium Access: Exploration, Exploitation and Competition
This paper establishes the equivalence between cognitive medium access and
the competitive multi-armed bandit problem. First, the scenario in which a
single cognitive user wishes to opportunistically exploit the availability of
empty frequency bands in the spectrum with multiple bands is considered. In
this scenario, the availability probability of each channel is unknown to the
cognitive user a priori. Hence efficient medium access strategies must strike a
balance between exploring the availability of other free channels and
exploiting the opportunities identified thus far. By adopting a Bayesian
approach for this classical bandit problem, the optimal medium access strategy
is derived and its underlying recursive structure is illustrated via examples.
To avoid the prohibitive computational complexity of the optimal strategy, a
low complexity asymptotically optimal strategy is developed. The proposed
strategy does not require any prior statistical knowledge about the traffic
pattern on the different channels. Next, the multi-cognitive user scenario is
considered and low complexity medium access protocols, which strike the optimal
balance between exploration and exploitation in such competitive environments,
are developed. Finally, this formalism is extended to the case in which each
cognitive user is capable of sensing and using multiple channels
simultaneously.Comment: Submitted to IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, 14 pages, 2 figure
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