Fair subcarrier and power allocation for multiuser orthogonal frequency-division multiple access cognitive radio networks using a colonel blotto game

The problem of subcarrier allocation (SA) and power allocation (PA) for both the downlink and uplink of cognitive radio networks (CRNs) is studied. Two joint SA and PA schemes based on Blotto games are presented for orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based CRNs. In this work, the authors consider a more practical scenario by taking into account the correlation between adjacent subcarriers. In the proposed games, secondary users (SUs) simultaneously compete for subcarriers using a limited budget. In order to win as many good subcarriers as possible, the SUs are required to wisely allocate their budget subject to the transmit power, budget and interference temperature constraints. Two PA and budget allocation strategies are derived to enable fair sharing of spectrum among the SUs. It is shown that by manipulating the total budget available for each SU, competitive fairness can be enforced. In addition, the conditions to ensure the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium (NE) in the proposed methods are established and algorithms which ensure convergence to NE are proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed methods can converge rapidly and allocate resources fairly and efficiently in correlated fading OFDMA channels.