Optimal Pricing of Spectrum Resources in Wireless Opportunistic Access

Abstract

We consider opportunistic access to spectrum resources in cognitive wireless networks. The users equipment, or the network nodes in general are able to sense the spectrum and adopt a subset of available resources (the spectrum and the power) individually and independently in a distributed manner, that is, based on their local channel quality information and not knowing the Channel State Information (CSI) of the other nodes' links in the considered network area. In such a network scenery, the competition of nodes for available resources is observed, which can be modeled as a game. To obtain spectrally efficient and fair spectrum allocation in this competitive environment with the nodes having no information on the other players, taxation of resources is applied to coerce desired behavior of the competitors. In the paper, we present mathematical formulation of the problem of finding the optimal taxation rate (common for all nodes) and propose a reduced-complexity algorithm for this optimization. Simulation results for these derived optimal values in various scenarios are also provided.