Game User-Oriented Multimedia Transmission over Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) networks have been developed to fully utilize spectrum resources. In the CR networks, imperfect sensing and selfish behavior of secondary users (SU) can significantly degrade the performance of primary users (PU). Game theory, which considers the game players´ (PU/SU) selfish behavior, has been extensively investigated in the design of CR network. However, most related works focus on the network protocol design from the network perspective to improve video transmission system (i.e., PU) performance such as utility and throughput. However, a user´s satisfaction such as user´s quality of experience (QoE) has been largely neglected in existing works. In this paper, we propose to design a game user-oriented CR network for video applications, aiming to improve the QoE of users. In the proposed framework, the primary user games and the secondary user games are formulated as Stackelberg game. Specifically, a refunding term is defined in the user´s utility function to effectively consider and to reflect the QoE requirement of video streaming users. Our contributions include two folds: (1) A game based CR network design for video transmission is proposed, and the network user´s QoE requirement is satisfied in the design; (2) The existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg game´s Nash equilibrium is proved, and the design is optimal. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the game-based user-oriented CR network design.