Game Theoretic Approaches for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Energy-Harvesting Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we propose game-theoretic approaches to model the cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio environment with cognitive secondary users (SU) capable of energy harvesting. An evolutionary game model is considered in the first scenario, where distributed SUs are allowed to choose between two strategies, cooperate to sense the spectrum, or deny to be a free rider. The sensed data is sent to a fusion center (FC) to have a final decision about the existence of the primary user. In the second scenario, the Stackelberg game is applied to model the case when the FC participates as a leader in the game, with carefully designed incentives to SUs to encourage cooperation. Simulation results show the behavior of the two proposed game models and quantify the improvement due to the FC intervention in the Stackelberg game model.