The Greening of Spectrum Sensing: A Minority Game-Based Mechanism Design

Cognitive radio technology allows the reuse of the underutilized frequency spectrum on an opportunistic and non-interfering basis by means of introducing, besides the legitimate primary users of the spectrum, a new kind of users called cognitive or secondary users. Thus, reliable spectrum sensing is critical to dynamically detect available licensed frequency bands and mitigate the primary signals, but it remains realistically difficult to carry out. In fact, although distributed collaborative sensing has turned out to be fruitful for the cognitive radio environment, its accuracy is often affected by the selfish and autonomous behavior of users. In this article, we model distributed spectrum sensing and channel allocation as a non-cooperative game, and apply the minority game to bring forth and study the cooperative behavior of users. The novelty brought by our study consists of alleviating the number of users contending for primary channels by giving them the opportunity to choose between the two, either sensing the channel or being inactive during the time slot. To address the trade-off faced by the SUs, we evaluate the performance of two secondary systems in a green communications context: energy consumption and transmission delay.