An auction-based framework for multimedia streaming over cognitive radio networks

Recently, many works have been proposed in the area of cognitive radio to efficiently utilize the spectrum for data communication. However, little effort has been made in content-aware multimedia applications over cognitive radio networks. In this paper, we study the multimedia streaming problem over cognitive radio networks. The uniquely scalable and delay-sensitive characteristics of multimedia data and the resulting impact on users' viewing experiences of multimedia content are explicitly involved in the utility functions, due to which the primary user and the secondary users can seamlessly switch among different quality levels to achieve the greatest utilities. Then, we formulate the spectrum allocation problem as an auction game and propose a distributively auction-based spectrum allocation scheme, which is spectrum allocation using Alternative Ascending Clock Auction (ACA-A). We prove that ACA-A is cheat-proof and can maximize the social welfare. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.