When brands fight over bands: Sociality in the cognitive radio ecosystem

As wireless devices continue to proliferate, spectrum management is essential to a healthy and functioning digital ecosystem. Here we present an evolutionary analysis of how interbrand relationships can be expected to evolve in the cognitive radio domain over long time scales. We find that a range of trajectories are possible, and that the eventual outcomes depend on a variety of system parameters including the number of users and transmission band switching costs. Starting from previous bio-socially inspired fair spectrum sharing protocols, we put forward an extended model of secondary user etiquette that allows for a range of inter-group dynamics to arise in the natural course of competition over and co-use of spectrum resources. We show that as populations grow, increases in transmission switching costs lead to evolutionary pressures toward increasing antagonism between brands, and that in such scenarios devices tend to segregate by brand across bands. Understanding the drivers behind emerging inter-brand dynamics from an evolutionary perspective is an important input to the long term view of the successful application of distributed spectrum access and cognitive radio.