Green opportunistic access for cognitive radio networks: A minority game approach

We investigate energy conservation and system performance of decentralized resource allocation scheme in cognitive radio networks thoroughly based on secondary users competitive behavior. Indeed, the contention on data channel unoccupied by licensed user leads to a single winner, but also involves a loss of energy of all nodes. In this paper, we apply minority game (MG) to the most important phase from the opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) process: the sensing phase. We attempt to carry out a cooperation in a non-cooperative environment with no information exchange. We study the Nash equilibrium solution for pure and fully mixed strategies, and we use distributed learning algorithms enabling cognitive users to learn the Nash equilibrium. Finally, we provide numerical results to validate the proposed approach. The resource allocation based on minority game approach improves secondary users battery life and the performance of the network. © 2014 IEEE.