A superprocess with upper confidence bounds for cooperative spectrum sharing

© 2016 IEEE.Cooperative Spectrum Sharing (CSS) is an appealing approach for primary users (PUs) to share spectrum with secondary users (SUs) because it increases the transmission range or rate of the PUs. Most previous works are focused on developing complex algorithms which may not be fast enough for real-time variations such as channel availability and/or assume perfect information about the network. Instead, we develop a learning mechanism for a PU to enable CSS in a strongly incomplete information scenario with low computational overhead. Our mechanism is based on a Markovian variant of multi-armed bandits (MABs) called superprocess, enhanced with the concept of Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) from stochastic MABs. By means of Monte-Carlo evaluations we show that, despite its low computational overhead, it converges to a low regret solution outperforming baseline approaches such as epsilon-greedy. This algorithm can be extended to include more sophisticated features while maintaining its desirable properties such as low computational overhead and fast speed of convergence.