Multi-user lax communications: a multi-armed bandit approach

Understand

Inspired by cognitive radio networks, we consider a setting where multiple users share several channels modeled as a multi-user multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem.

• The characteristics of each channel are unknown and are different for each user.
• Each user can choose between the channels, but her success depends on the particular channel chosen as well as on the selections of other users: if two users select the same channel their messages collide and none of them manages to send any data.
• Our setting is fully distributed, so there is no central control.