Optimality of Multichannel Myopic Sensing in the Presence of Sensing Error for Opportunistic Spectrum Access

Abstract

The optimization problem for the performance of opportunistic spectrum access is considered in this study. A user, with the limited sensing capacity, has opportunistic access to a communication system with multiple channels. The user can only choose several channels to sense and decides whether to access these channels based on the sensing information in each time slot. Meanwhile, the presence of sensing error is considered. A reward is obtained when the user accesses a channel. The objective is to maximize the expected (discounted or average) reward accrued over an infinite horizon. This problem can be formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process. This study shows the optimality of the simple and robust myopic policy which focuses on maximizing the immediate reward. The results show that the myopic policy is optimal in the case of practical interest.