Design and Implementation of Distributed Dynamic Spectrum Allocation Protocol

In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate a resource allocation protocol for distributed dynamic spectrum access (DSA). This protocol, based on learning techniques, enables users to locate and exploit unused spectrum opportunities effectively. It relies on private objective functions in order to allow users to maximize their achieved reward/throughput from accessing the DSA system. This protocol, implemented and tested using ns3, considers that users ending up selecting the same spectrum band share the band equally among themselves by means of a carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) scheme. We use ns3 to implement our proposed protocol, thus allowing us to evaluate its performance while taking into account various practical implementation aspects and constraints, such as packet collision due to medium access contention, traffic overhead due to information sharing among users, and errors due to estimation models. Using simulations, we show the impact of several practical aspects on the performance of proposed protocol.