Trekking based distributed algorithm for opportunistic spectrum access in infrastructure-less network

Abstract

An opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) in the infrastructure-less network has received significant attention in last few years due to their ability to improve spectrum utilization as well as usefulness in the infrastructure-less networks established for disaster relief and military applications. The main research problem for feasible implementation of such network is to achieve coordination among secondary users (SUs) (i.e. unlicensed users). Existing algorithms incur a significant number of collisions which in turn require retransmissions and hence, lead to inefficient use of battery power, spectrum and time. In this paper, we set-up the problem as a multi-player Bandit and develop a new distributed algorithm which allows SUs to select one of the top channels with a significantly fewer number of collisions. We show that the proposed algorithm has constant regret with high confidence. We validate our claims and the superiority of the proposed algorithm over existing state-of-the-art algorithms through the exhaustive simulated experiments as well as a realistic USRP based experiments in the real radio environment.