Game-Theoretic Analysis of Selfish Secondary Users in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we study the problem of selfish behavior of secondary users (SUs) based on cognitive radio (CR) with the presence of primary users (PUs). SUs are assumed to contend on a channel using the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) and PUs do not consider transmission of SUs, where CSMA/CA protocols rely on the random deference of packets. SUs are vulnerable to selfish attacks by which selfish users could pick short random deference to obtain a larger share of the available bandwidth at the expense of other SUs. In this paper, game theory is used to study the systematic cheating of SUs in the presence of PUs in multichannel CR networks. We study two cases: A single cheater and multiple cheaters acting without any restraint. We identify the Pareto-optimal point of operation of a network with multiple cheaters and also derive the Nash equilibrium of the network. We use cooperative game theory to drive the Pareto optimality of selfish SUs without interfering with the activity of PUs. We show the influence of the activity of PUs in the equilibrium of the whole network.