A novel game theoretic approach for market-driven dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radio networks

Current cutting-edge solutions to the spectrum shortage problem are unable to meet the growing demand for a limited spectrum. A key dimension beyond state-of-the-art solutions is to exploit the free spectrum more effectively. Although various schemes have been proposed for trading spectrum, few studies have focused on optimal admission of spectrum requests for maximizing service providers' (SP’s) profit. Thus, this timely study presents a novel intelligent admission scheme for spectrum requests from the perspective of a non-cooperative game, in which the information of all participants (customers and providers) is incomplete to others, and each player wishes to maximize its benefit. The proposed control admission policy may evict clients in-service to release spectrum for serving certain, e.g., wealthy clients. Evicted clients are compensated using a dynamic strategy that adopts greedy game theory to capture the conflict of interest between SP and evicted users. Simulation experiment results validate and demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed scheme, compared to a benchmark reinforcement learning approach and another widely used scheme for admission and eviction control of cognitive radio users.