Spectrum Trading in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Contract-Theoretic Modeling Approach

—Cognitive radio is a promising paradigm to achieve efficient utilization of spectrum resource by allowing the unlicensed users (i.e., secondary users, SUs) to access the licensed spectrum. Market-driven spectrum trading is an efficient way to achieve dynamic spectrum accessing/sharing. In this paper, we consider the problem of spectrum trading with single primary spectrum owner (or primary user, PO) selling his idle spectrum to multiple SUs. We model the trading process as a monopoly market, in which the PO acts as monopolist who sets the qualities and prices for the spectrum he sells, and the SUs act as consumers who choose the spectrum with appropriate quality and price for purchasing. We design a monopolist-dominated quality-price contract, which is offered by the PO and contains a set of qualityprice combinations each intended for a consumer type. A contract is feasible if it is incentive compatible (IC) and individually rational (IR) for each SU to purchase the spectrum with ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: JSAC
• Authors: Lin Gao, Xinbing Wang, Youyun Xu, Qian Zhang
• Keywords: JSAC 2011, Promising Paradigm, Spectrum Owner, Spectrum Trading