A Reliable Co-operative Decision-Making Technique for the Improvement in the Performance of Multi-User CRN Using Coalition Game Theory

In the past few years, there has been a proliferation in commercial wireless services such as mobile, Wi-Fi, TV, etc. This has raised a demand for radio spectrum. As per the reports of spectrum occupancy and spectrum policy task force, most of the allocated spectrums are underutilized. Cognitive radio is an emerging technology, which can improve the spectrum utilization efficiency. Reliable spectrum sensing decision-making is a strenuous task in multi-user cognitive radio network (CRN). For enhancing spectrum utilization of such a network and obtaining a faster collaborative decision from honest secondary users, this paper proposes a reliable intra-coalition and inter-coalition decision-making technique (DMT). In this technique, the investigation of Pareto optimal coalitions is performed. Spectrum/channels have been allocated based on Pareto optimality of coalitions. Further, the performance of multi-user CRN has been evaluated using the proposed and traditional DMTs (i.e. OR/AND/maximum voting/half voting rules). It has been noticed that the proposed DMT outperforms DMTs. The performance parameters such as fusion decision processing time and the end-to-end communication delay to obtain a reliable collaborative decision have been reduced by approximately 50% using the proposed DMT compared to the traditional DMTs.