Cooperative Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Distributed Matching Approach

We study the relay-based communication schemes for cooperative spectrum sharing among multiple primary users (PUs) and multiple secondary users (SUs) with incomplete information. Inspired by the matching theory, we model the network as a matching market. In this market, each PU proposes a certain proposal representing a combination of relay power and spectrum access time to attract the SUs, while each SU maximizes its utility by selecting the most suitable PU. We derive the sufficient and necessary conditions for a stable matching in which none of the PUs or SUs would like to change its decision. We further establish a distributed matching algorithm (DMA) and a DMA with utility increasing (DMA-UI) to achieve the equilibria in partially incomplete and incomplete information scenarios, respectively. Moreover, we provide detailed discussions on the implementation of the distributed algorithms in practical networks. Simulation results show that the losses of PUs' total utilities caused by incomplete information are diminished when the number of SUs increases. Specifically, the effects of the incomplete information are reduced as the competition among SUs (PUs) is more intensive than that among PUs (SUs).