Evolutionary game for joint spectrum sensing and access in cognitive radio networks

Many spectrum sensing and access algorithms have been proposed to improve secondary users' (SUs') opportunities of utilizing primary spectrums. However, most of them have separated the analysis of spectrum sensing and access. In this paper, we propose to integrate the design of spectrum sensing and access algorithms by taking into account the mutual influence of them. Due to selfish natures, SUs tend to access the primary channel without contribution to the spectrum sensing. Moreover, they may take out-of-equilibrium strategies because of the uncertainty of others' strategies. To model the complicated interactions among SUs, we formulate the joint spectrum sensing and access problem as an evolutionary game and derive the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) that no one will deviate from. Furthermore, we design a distributed learning algorithm for SUs to converge to the ESS. With the proposed algorithm, each SU senses and accesses the primary channel with the probabilities learned purely from its own past utility history, and finally achieves the desired ESS. Simulation results shows that our system can quickly converge to the ESS and such an ESS is robust to the sudden unfavorable deviations of selfish SUs.