Stochastic MAC-layer Interference Model for Opportunistic Spectrum Access: A Weighted Graphical Game Approach

This article investigates the problem of distributed channel selection in opportunistic spectrum access networks from a perspective of interference minimization. The traditional physical (PHY)-layer interference model is for information theoretic analysis. When practical multiple access mechanisms are considered, the recently developed binary medium access control (MAC)-layer interference model in the previous work is more useful, in which the experienced interference of a user is defined as the number of competing users. However, the binary model is not accurate in mathematics analysis with poor achievable performance. Therefore, we propose a real-valued one called stochastic MAC-layer interference model, where the utility of a player is defined as a function of the aggregate weight of the stochastic interference of competing neighbors. Then, the distributed channel selection problem in the stochastic MAC-layer interference model is formulated as a weighted stochastic MAC-layer interference minimization game and we proved that the game is an exact potential game which exists one pure strategy Nash equilibrium point at least. By using the proposed stochastic learning-automata based uncoupled algorithm with heterogeneous learning parameter (SLA-H), we can achieve suboptimal convergence averagely and this result can be verified in the simulation. Moreover, the simulated results also prove that the proposed stochastic model can achieve higher throughput performance and faster convergence behavior than the binary one.