Truthful Auction for Resource Allocation in Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks

Cooperative cognitive radio network (CCRN) is a promising paradigm to increase spectrum utilization and exploit spatial diversity. The allocation of two related resources, i.e. spectrum and relay nodes, plays a fundamental role in the performance of CCRNs. However, previous works either lack of incentives for both primary users (PUs) and relay nodes to participate in or consider spectrum auction and relay auction separately. In this paper, we consider a static cooperative cognitive radio network scenario with several PUs and multiple secondary user coteries, each of which consists of a set of secondary users who are interested in sharing the same secondary relay node. We model the problem of joint spectrum allocation and relay allocation as a hierarchical auction and propose TERA, which is the first Truthful auction mechanism for Efficient Resource Allocation in CCRNs. We show that TERA satisfies critical economic properties such as truthful, individual rationality, budget balance, supply limits and computational efficiency. Furthermore, we theoretically prove TERA can achieve near-optimal revenue with high probability. Finally, extensive simulation results show that TERA is efficient and able to improve the utility of PUs and relay nodes significantly up to 125% and 151% respectively.