A game-theoretic approach for joint channel and power allocation in downlink of cellular cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we consider a cellular cognitive radio network that uses opportunistic spectrum access for its transmission in the downlink direction from base stations toward cognitive radio users. Since the spectrum is licensed to a primary network, proper resource management should be employed in the secondary network to protect primary users against excessive interference while providing acceptable utilization for secondary users. We use game theory to propose a distributed method for joint frequency and power allocation in the downlink of cognitive radio networks. Earlier works in this area were based on centralized optimization-based approaches, whereas our proposed method solves the problem of joint resource allocation in a distributed way at lower complexity and less message passing. Comparing the proposed decentralized method with a centralized method shows that our proposed joint resource allocation scheme results in significantly less power consumption while supporting more secondary users.