COMAS: A Cooperative Multiagent Architecture for Spectrum Sharing

Abstract

Static spectrum allocation is a major problem in recent wireless network domains. Generally, these allocations lead to inefficient usage creating empty spectrum holes or white spaces. Thus, some alternatives must be ensured in order to mitigate the current spectrum scarcity. An effective technology to ensure dynamic spectrum usage is cognitive radio, which seeks the unutilized spectrum portions opportunistically and shares them with the neighboring devices. However, since users generally have a limited knowledge about their environment, we claim that cooperative behavior can provide them with the necessary information to solve the global issues. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a novel approach for spectrum allocation using a multiagent system that enables cognitive radio devices to work cooperatively with their neighboring licensed (or primary user) devices in order to utilize the available spectrum dynamically. The fundamental aspect of our approach is the deployment of an agent on each device which cooperates with its neighboring agents in order to have a better spectrum sharing. Considering the concurrent, distributed, and autonomous nature of the proposed approach, Petri nets are adopted to model the cooperative behaviors of primary and cognitive radio users. Our simulation results show that the proposed solution achieves good performance in terms of spectrum access, sustaining lower communication overhead.