Fungible Orthogonal Channel Sets for Multi-User Exploitation of Spectrum

This paper proposes a two-stage process for assigning fungible orthogonal channel sets to multiple cognitive radios (CRs) for opportunistic spectrum access. Assigning orthogonal channel sets to the CRs eliminates the possibility of collision among them, and allows the CRs to focus on avoiding collisions with the primary user (PU). In particular, each CR uses a learning-based dynamic channel selection (DCS) algorithm to maximize the exploitation of the assigned channels. We propose a neural network that can accurately estimate the performance of the adopted learning-based DCS algorithm on a set of channels, using the duty cycle and the complexity of the PU´s behavior on the channels. Our simulations on synthetic and real measurement data sets show that the proposed channel sets allocation algorithm, together with the neural network, significantly outperforms a method that selects channels with the lowest duty cycle.