Joint cooperative sensing and scheduling in cognitive radio by mechanism design

We propose a study for jointing cooperative spectrum sensing and resource scheduling in cognitive radio by mechanism design approach. The primary channel is assumed to operate in a TDM manner. The primary users (PUs) have strict priority over the secondary users (SUs) and the SUs opportunistically access the channels not occupied by the PUs temporarily. A hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to characterize the activity of the channel and the observation process. At the beginning of each slot, each SU senses the channel and observes his buffer state and then reports the sensing result and buffer state information to the virtual central controller. On the basis of the reports, the central controller makes a decision on the usage of the time slot. In consideration of rational users may cheat on location information to profit, we construct a VCG pricing mechanism, which is shown to be incentive compatible in ex-post Nash equilibrium, individually rational and efficient, to prevent rational users from cheating.