An Oligopoly Spectrum Pricing with Behavior of Primary Users for Cognitive Radio Networks

Dynamic spectrum sharing is a key technology to improve spectrum utilization in wireless networks. The elastic spectrum management provides a new opportunity for licensed primary users and unlicensed secondary users to efficiently utilize the scarce wireless resource. In this paper, we present a game-theoretic framework for dynamic spectrum allocation where the primary users rent the unutilized spectrum to the secondary users for a monetary profit. In reality, due to the ON-OFF behavior of the primary user, the quantity of spectrum that can be opportunistically shared by the secondary users is limited. We model this situation with the renewal theory and formulate the spectrum pricing scheme with the Bertrand game, taking into account the scarcity of the spectrum. By the Nash-equilibrium pricing scheme, each player in the game continually converges to a strategy that maximizes its own profit. We also investigate the impact of several properties, including channel quality and spectrum substitutability. Based on the equilibrium analysis, we finally propose a decentralized algorithm that leads the primary users to the Nash-equilibrium, called DST. The stability of the proposed algorithm in terms of convergence to the Nash equilibrium is also studied.