A Game-Theoretic Approach for Uncoordinated Access to Cognitive Resources

Cognitive radio networks are evolving as a strong enabler of Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity in newer generations of wireless communication systems such as 5G and beyond 5G (B5G). This connectivity presents challenges specifically in heterogeneous networks with spectrum sharing and primary users' constraints. The setup considered in this work is representative of a heterogeneous environment of IoT users (devices) competing for channel access with present primary users. This work proposes a game-theoretic strategy for uncoordinated channel access in a communication environment to alleviate the overhead of coordination and protect primary user's constraints. A multi-user cognitive environment is investigated in this article, where secondary users of the system communicate over a channel licensed to the primary user while satisfying the outage probability requirements of the primary user of the channel. Focusing on one secondary user, we devise a channel access strategy that achieves the intended performance objectives while satisfying the quality of service constraints. The secondary user of interest is modeled as a resource-constrained device that chooses to transmit over the channel only during select time intervals. The dynamical interaction between the secondary users is modeled using iterated zero-determinant game-theoretic strategies. The results of this work indicate that the selected secondary user has the potential to achieve its long-term target performance using the iterated game-theoretic strategies and show the impact of the strategy parameters on the performance metrics.