Pricing and Market Strategies for Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks: Overview and Visionary Frameworks

Recently, the demand for radio frequency spectrum in wireless cellular communication systems has increased. Mainly, this is due to the need for smart applications to have a huge bandwidth. As a result, there is a scarcity of spectrum. This problem can be solved using recently introduced technologies, like Cognitive Radio (CR) technology. The main goal of using this technique is to ensure secondary users (SUs) to dynamically exploit the unutilized channel in the licensed spectrum, which is owned by primary radio networks (PRNs). Compared with the traditional spectrum access outline, cognitive radio technology has extremely improved the utility of spectrum without increasing any communication infrastructure. The cognitive radio network (CRN) leases the unutilized channel from PRNs to serve the SUs in an efficient way. This paper sought to focus on the economic aspect of spectrum sharing among PRNs with CRNs to serve SUs in an efficient way, maximizing CRNs profit. There are many examples or scenarios that result from CRNs including spectrum sharing, security, power control and allocation, data pricing and quality of service (QoS) management. Of the before mentioned factors, quality of service and data pricing are the main concerns in our objective function, which is to maximize the profit of CRN. Sometimes the QoS cannot be guaranteed in CRNs, primarily due to spectrum uncertainty under a CRN tuning. An even more important motivation for this work is to create a way to choose one of the different CRNs in different PRNs by the SUs based on data pricing in order to maximize the CRNs profit.