Evolutionary Game Framework for Behavior Dynamics in Cooperative Spectrum Sensing

Cooperative spectrum sensing has been shown to greatly improve the sensing performance in cognitive radio networks. However, if the cognitive users belong to different service providers, they tend to contribute less in sensing in order to achieve a higher throughput. In this paper, the authors propose an evolutionary game framework to study the interactions between selfish users in cooperative sensing. They derive the behavior dynamics and the stationary strategy of the secondary users, and further propose a distributed learning algorithm that helps the secondary users approach the Nash equilibrium with only local payoff observation.