Toward Optimal Adaptive Wireless Communications in Unknown Environments

Abstract

Designing efficient channel access schemes for wireless communications without any prior knowledge about the nature of environments has been a very challenging issue, especially when the channel states distribution of all spectrum resources could be entirely or partially stochastic and/or adversarial at different time and locations. In this paper, we propose an adaptive channel access algorithm for wireless communications in unknown environments based on the theory of multi-armed bandits (MAB) problems. By automatically tuning two control parameters, i.e., learning rate and exploration probability, our algorithms are capable of finding the optimal channel access strategies and achieving the almost optimal learning performance over time under our defined four typical regimes for general unknown environments, e.g., the stochastic regime where channels follow some unknown i.i.d process, the adversarial regime where all channels are suffered by adversarial jamming attack, the mixed stochastic and adversarial regime where a subset of channels are attacked and the contaminated stochastic regime where occasionally adversarial events contaminate the stochastic channel process, etc. To reduce the implementation time and space complexity, we further develop an enhanced algorithm by exploiting the internal structure of the selection of channel access strategy. We conduct extensive simulations in all these regimes to validate our theoretical analysis. The quantitative performance studies indicate the superior throughput gain and the flexibility of our algorithm in practice, which is resilient to both oblivious and adaptive jamming attacks with different intelligence and any attacking strength that ranges from no-attack to the full-attack of all spectrum resources.