Multiagent Based Spectrum Sharing Using Petri Nets

Abstract

This paper presents a cooperative framework for dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radio networks, where the cognitive radio devices may use the currently unutilized spectrum dynamically and opportunistically. The proposed solution works on the principle of multiagent system that allows the cooperation amongst several participating devices. The key aspect of our design is the deployment of agents on each of the primary and cognitive radio device that cooperates in order to have a better and dynamic use of the spectrum. For cooperation, contract net protocol is considered allowing spectrum to be dynamically allocated by having a series of exchange of messages. Due to the concurrent, distributed and autonomous nature of our approach, Petri nets are adopted to model the behavior of cooperative framework. Based on Petri nets, we study the internal message passing and spectrum allocation mechanism between the participating primary and cognitive radio users and identify the information needed by the agents to make cooperative decisions. Then, using empirical results, we show that our approach achieves up to 80% of the whole utility within the span of few messages, and provides an effective mechanism for distributed spectrum allocation.