Pricing-based spectrum leasing in cognitive radio networks

According to the property rights model of cognitive radio, primary users who own the spectrum resource have the right to lease part of the spectrum to secondary users (SUs) in exchange for appropriate profit. In this study, the authors propose a pricing-based spectrum leasing framework between one primary user and multiple SUs. In this scenario, the primary user attempts to maximise its utility by setting the price of spectrum, the selected SUs have the right to decide their power levels to help the primary user´s transmission, aiming to obtain corresponding spectrum access time. Then, the spectrum leasing problem can be cast into a Stackelberg game, which jointly maximises the utilities of primary user and SUs. Moreover, the authors design a joint relay selection and admission control algorithm, which can select the proper SUs and protect all the active SUs´ performance. Numerical results show that the proposed pricing-based spectrum leasing framework is effective, and the performance of the primary user and the SUs is both improved, compared with the traditional mechanism without cooperation.