Multi-User Multi-Armed Bandits for Uncoordinated Spectrum Access

The existing spectrum management paradigm treats frequency spectrum as a fixed commodity, which leads to spectrum under utilization. Cognitive radio has emerged as a useful strategy to increase spectrum utilization. The existing literature on cognitive radio has largely been focused on the primary/secondary user paradigm, where secondary users need to detect vacant spectrum when available and vacate the occupied spectrum when a primary user wants to transmit. We focus on a different type of spectrum sharing system in which there is no distinction between users, and in which there is no coordination among the users. The collective performance across all users is more important than that of individual users. This is in contrast to the typical primary/secondary user paradigm in which secondary users bear the responsibility for ensuring priority-based spectrum sharing.