Optimal Cooperative Internetwork Spectrum Sharing for Cognitive Radio Systems With Spectrum Pooling

Spectrum pooling in cognitive radio systems is an approach to manage the available spectrum bands from different licensed networks. Most previous work on spectrum pooling concentrates on the system architecture and the design of flexible-access algorithms and schemes. In this paper, we present a cooperative scheme for internetwork spectrum sharing among multiple secondary systems, which takes into account the price and spectrum efficiency as the design criteria. Specifically, the spectrum-sharing problem is formulated as a stochastic bandit system; thus, the optimal spectrum-sharing scheme is simply allocating the new available band to the secondary network with the lowest index. Extensive simulation examples illustrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves the performance compared with the existing scheme that ignores optimal spectrum sharing.