Joint Pricing and Decision-Making for Heterogeneous User Demand in Cognitive Radio Networks

The cognitive radio technique allows secondary users (SUs) to share the spectrum with primary users (PUs) in an exclusive or opportunistic manner. This paper studies spectrum pricing conducted by spectrum owners, that is, primary operators (POs), and SU decision-making strategies for three kinds of duopoly markets. The single-band exclusive use market considers two POs with each providing a single band dedicated to SUs. A pre-emptive resume priority (PRP) M/M/1 queueing model is presented, based on which SUs decide to join which PO and which queue. We prove the existence of a unique Wardrop equilibrium for the decision-making process, and a unique Nash equilibrium for the proposed parallel pricing strategy. In a single-band mixed use market, the competition of two POs is represented by a Stackelberg game. We formulate the spectrum sharing among PU and SUs with a 3-level PRP M/M/1 queueing structure, and derive the close form expressions of SUs' queueing delay. In a multiband exclusive use market, where POs have to determine how many bands they will rent as well as the admission price, we define the problem as a mixed integer linear programming problem and propose a global particle swarm optimization algorithm to find the global optimum. Finally, we study a generalized scenario with multiple POs and multiple priority queues.