Emergence of pecking order in social Cognitive Radio societies

In the face of the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the limited capacity of radio spectrum is likely to reach saturation. Cognitive Radio technology has been proposed to relieve over-saturated channels by allowing for licensed channels to be opportunistically accessed by unlicensed users during periods of time when the license holder is absent from its channel. Un-coordinated competition over a limited number of resources among unlicensed spectrum users leads to complex co-existence challenges. Here we present a new bio-social inspired paradigm for cognitive radio, extending our previous work where we showed a plausible evolutionary trajectory of intra-groups dynamics over time as groups abide by two social behavioral rules, in-group deference and out-group avoidance. In this paper, we relax these social behavior rules in order to allow groups to organize into different social structures. More specifically, we observe how a hierarchical society compares to a classless society. We show that as the system scales, the hierarchical social structure is more likely to emerge in a distributed cognitive radio network. The bio-social paradigm presented here has consequences both in suggesting potential improvements for dynamic spectrum access, and in understanding the natural evolvement of social structures as cognitive radio devices form groups to gain advantage in the competition over resources.