Negotiating Multichannel Sensing and Access In Cognitive Radio Wireless Networks

We investigate the following question - how should secondary users coordinate with each other to determine which channels to sense and potentially access in a cognitive radio network? If users may have a potentially different valuation of each channel and don´t know of each other´s valuations, then it is unclear whether there may be some benefit to explicitly exchanging this information, albeit at some cost, in order to minimize their chances of picking the same channel. We formulate and analyze a relevant 2-player 2-channel game and quantify how the cost of gathering the information affects the optimal number of rounds of negotiation.