A pricing-based cooperative spectrum sharing stackelberg game

In this paper, we study the problem of cooperative spectrum sharing among a primary user (PU) and multiple secondary users (SUs) under quality of service (QoS) constraints. The SUs network is controlled by the PU through a relay which gets a revenue for amplifying and forwarding the SUs´ signals to their respective destinations. The relay charges each SU a different price depending on its received signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR). The primary relay controls the SUs network and maximize any desired PU utility function. The PU utility function represents its QoS, which is affected by the SUs access, and its gained revenue to allow the access of the SUs. The problem of maximizing the primary utility is formulated as a Stackelberg game and solved through three different approaches, namely, the optimal, the heuristic and the suboptimal algorithms.