A Stackelberg Game for Spectrum Leasing in Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks

According to the property-rights model of cognitive radio, primary users (PUs) who own the spectrum resource have the right to lease part of spectrum to secondary users (SUs) in exchange for appropriate profit. In this paper, we propose a pricing-based spectrum leasing framework between one PU and multiple SUs. In this scenario, the PU attempts to maximize its utility by setting the price of spectrum. Then, the selected SUs have the right to decide their power levels to help PU's transmission, aiming to obtain corresponding access time. The spectrum leasing problem can be cast into a stackelberg game, where the PU plays the seller-level game and the selected SUs play the buyer-level game. Through analysis based on the backward induction, we prove that there exists a unique equilibrium in the stackelberg game with certain constraints. Numerical results show that the proposed pricing-based spectrum leasing framework is effective, and the performance of both PU and SUs is improved, compared to the traditional mechanism without cooperation.