Towards a game theoretical modeling of rational collaborative spectrum sensing in Cognitive Radio networks

Collaborative spectrum sensing has been proposed recently to improve the sensing performance in Cognitive Radio networks. However, cooperative sensing will also introduce extra cost to the collaborator, such as the cooperative time and energy consumption. In reality, whether the rational secondary users have incentive to join the collaboration depends upon whether the benefit of the collaboration could outweigh the cost. In this paper, we model it as the Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Game (CSSG). In this game, every secondary user could choose to collaborate or not in each time slot, and the payoff is measured in terms of data throughput. Since the effectiveness of collaboration is proportional to the number of the collaborators, secondary users' decisions are based on how many users will choose to collaborate. Thus, CSSG could be modeled as the classic game: the Stag Hunt Game. In addition, to avoid the cooperation failure, we propose Cooperative Communication Incentive Scheme (CCIS) to enhance the collaborative sensing. At last, the numerical analysis about CSSG as well as the proposed scheme CCIS is given.