Resource Pricing with Primary Service Guarantees in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Stackelberg Game Approach

Cognitive Radio (CR) is envisioned as one of the most promising technologies to solve the problem of spectrum scarcity. A critical problem that limits the development of CR technology is the absence of a mechanism efficient enough to allocate under-utilized spectrum resource from primary users (PUs) to multiple secondary users (SUs) [1], [2]. Toward this end, we adopt "Game Theory" [3], [4] as our modeling tool. Spectrum users can be modeled as selfish, rational players in this spectrum selling game with PUs as spectrum sellers and SUs as buyers. Considering that PUs always know more about the "market" than SUs and marking prices should always be ahead of purchasing, we use a Stackelberg Game to analyze the pricing and allocation process of PUs and SUs under the circumstance of information asymmetry. A parameter I is later introduced to measure the negative impact from SUs to PUs. If given a predefined value of I, a feasible pricing region can be found to guarantee the primary service. Finally, a contract between PUs and SUs is proposed as a counterpart of the information asymmetry and a utility increase of SUs is observed when the contract is valid.