Price-based Resource Allocation for Virtualized Cognitive Radio Networks

We consider a virtualized cognitive radio (CR) network, where multiple virtual network operators (VNOs) who own different virtual cognitive base stations (VCBSs) share the same physical CBS (PCBS) which is owned by an infrastructure provider (InP), sharing the spectrum with the primary user (PU). The uplink scenario is considered where the secondary users (SUs) transmit to the VCBSs. The PU is protected by constraining the interference power from the SUs. Such constraint is applied by the InP through pricing the interference. A Stackelberg game is formulated to jointly maximize the revenue of the InP and the individual utilities of the VNOs, and then the Stackelberg equilibrium is investigated. Specifically, the optimal interference price and channel allocation for the VNOs to maximize the revenue of the InP and the optimal power allocation for the SUs to maximize the individual utilities of the VNOs are derived. In addition, a low‐complexity ±‐optimal solution is also proposed for obtaining the interference price and channel allocation for the VNOs. Simulations are provided to verify the proposed strategies. It is shown that the proposed strategies are effective in resource allocation and the ±‐optimal strategy achieves practically the same performance as the optimal strategy can achieve. It is also shown that the InP will not benefit from a large interference power limit, and selecting VNOs with higher unit rate utility gain to share the resources of the InP is beneficial to both the InP and the VNOs.