An Incentivized Cooperative Architecture for Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

The existing dynamic spectrum access network architecture fails to offer incentives to primary users (PUs). Therefore, PUs are unwilling to cooperate with secondary users (SUs) and intend to set up stringent requirements on SUs´ spectrum access. This diminishes the benefit of dynamic spectrum access and hinders its commercialization success. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for dynamic spectrum access networks, termed incentivized cooperative dynamic spectrum access network (IC-DSAN), to motivate PUs to cooperate with SUs, such that both PUs and SUs achieve significantly higher performance. In an IC-DSAN, SU nodes serve as relays between PU nodes and while relaying PU packets, utilize network coding to encode SU packets onto PU packets, i.e., SU packets get a `free ride´ via network coding. To further improve the performance, we propose a new network coding scheme termed coding over coded packets. At last, an optimization model is developed to analyze the throughput gain of IC-DSAN. The performance evaluation indicates that the throughputs of both PUs and SUs significantly increase.