Evolutionary pressures in emerging societies of secondary users in cognitive radio networks

Wireless communication is an increasingly ubiquitous and important aspect of the digital ecosystem. In the face of rapid growth in the population of Internet of Things reached 4+ billion devices in 2014, and is expected to continue to grow, reaching 25 billion by 2020, the limited capacity of radio spectrum is likely to reach saturation. In this paper, we show that evolutionary pressures in CR societies necessarily drive the emergence of more advanced sensing capabilities, and correspondingly more sophisticated models of resource sharing. We put forth four evolutionary stages for CR societies, based on well-established biological analogues, and demonstrate that at each stage of CR evolution, a subpopulation that is able to engage more advanced sensing capabilities and couse strategies is able to better extract greater utility from spectrum resources. In this manner, we see that each stage of CR evolution prepares the way for the next: the present societies of nonforagers facilitate the emergence of foragers; foragers give way to contention-sensing rational CR societies; these, in turn, will likely facilitate the emergence of sociality. Each evolutionary stage is enabled by advances in sensory capabilities, and gives rise to new sophisticated resource sharing schemes that yield more efficient utilization of radio spectrum for secondary users, regardless of primary user activity.