Game-theoretic analysis of opportunistic spectrum sharing with imperfect sensing

We consider the strategic behavior of secondary users (SUs) in a cognitive radio system where SUs opportunistically share a single primary user (PU) band over a coverage area. The service of an SU can be interrupted by a PU in a preemptive manner, and the interrupted SU may abandon the system or wait until the PU band is sensed available. In the latter case, if spectrum sensing errors occur, they will cause misdetections and false alarms which impact the system’s performance heavily. In this paper, we model this problem as a retrial queueing system with server breakdowns and recoveries in which the interrupted SUs are treated as retrial customers. They will retry for using the PU band after some period of time due to interruptions or misdetections. The arrival of a PU during service of an SU is modeled as a server breakdown, and the recovery time is equivalent to the service time of this PU. We focus on the behavior of arriving SUs who can make decisions on whether to join the system or to balk based on a natural cost structure and the delays caused by PUs’ interruptions, which can be studied as a non-cooperative game. The equilibrium and optimal strategies of SUs are both derived. Furthermore, to bridge the gap between the individually and socially optimal strategies, a novel strategy of imposing an admission fee on SUs to join the retrial group is proposed. Finally, some numerical examples are presented to show the effect of several key parameters on the system performance.