Risk-Aware Cooperative Spectrum Access for Multi-Channel Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, risk-aware cooperative spectrum access schemes for cognitive radio networks (CRNs) with multiple channels are proposed, whereby multiple primary users (PUs) operating over different channels choose trustworthy secondary users (SUs) as relays to improve throughput, and in return SUs gain transmission opportunities. To study the multi-channel cooperative spectrum access, cooperation over single channel is investigated first, which involves a PU selecting the suitable SU and granting a period of access time to the selected SU as a reward, considering trustworthiness of SUs. The above procedure is modeled as a Stackelberg game, through which access time allocation and power allocation are obtained. Based on the above results, cooperation over multiple channels is studied from the perspectives of the primary network and secondary network, respectively. Two schemes are proposed accordingly: the primary network-centric matching (PCM) scheme and the secondary network-centric cluster-based (SCC) scheme. In PCM scheme, cooperating SU for each channel is determined to maximize the total utility of the primary network, which is formulated as a maximum weight matching problem. In SCC scheme, SUs first form a cluster to share the channel state information (CSI), and the best SUs are selected for cooperation with PUs over different channels to obtain the maximum aggregate access time for the secondary network. Then, SUs share the obtained resource using congestion game and quadrature signalling. Numerical results demonstrate that, with the proposed schemes, PUs can achieve higher throughput, while SUs can obtain longer average access time, compared with the random channel access approach.