Author : Samkit K. Shah and Kiran R. Parmar

This paper throws light on the issue of spectrum sharing in cognitive radio networks where the secondary users cooperatively sense the spectrum for identifying and accessing temporarily unoccupied frequency spectrum bands. Here, it is shown that this issue can be modeled as a cooperative game in order to allocate the spectrum resources fairly to each cognitive radio. The users form coalitions to jointly sense and share the spectrum bands. The worth of each user is calculated according to the work done by the user for the corresponding coalition with respect to the information collected about the primary user activity from sensing the spectrum band. Resulting games are balanced, thus ensuring non-empty cores for allocating resources to the users. It is also found that the games are also convex, hence enabling one-point solution concepts like the Shapley value, tau value and nucleolus which lie within the core to provide stability. The simulation results for the game model applied to the case of 5 users and 8 channels are also illustrated.

Keywords: Cognitive radio; spectrum sensing; cooperative game theory; characteristic function; Shapley values

Article published in International Journal of Current  Engineering  and Technology, Vol.4,No.3 (June- 2014)