Behavior Propagation in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Social Network Approach

A key feature of cognitive radio network is the intelligence of secondary users who can collaborate to improve the system performance. The collaboration in terms of channel recommendation is studied in this paper. The recommendation mechanism results in dynamics of the channel preferences of secondary users, thus causing a behavior propagation in a social network. For cognitive radio networks having a grid topology, the ergodicity of the dynamics is studied using the model of interacting particles in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. For networks having a grid topology or being randomly deployed, mean field descriptions using ordinary differential equation are used to explicitly describe the dynamics of behavior propagation. The analytic results are demonstrated by numerical simulations.