Cognitive radio games

As our radios get smarter, they\´ll be competing for over-crowded airwaves. Game theory can make them cooperate. The cognitive-radio game the author sketched here is admittedly an idealization. Things rapidly become more complicated when you consider more realistic spectrum-sharing situations. For some frequency bands, for example, a primary licensee will be involved, in which case you need to figure in the value of the payments secondary users must make to the "owner" of the spectrum (or even to one another) in determining their motivations. Also, real cognitive radios are able to adjust in more ways than just by switching their transmissions on or off. They can be required to limit the amount of power they use to transmit or to shift to a protocol that sends less data but produces less interference for others. The variations are nearly endless.