Incentivize cooperative sensing in distributed cognitive radio networks with reputation-based pricing

In a cognitive radio network, selfish secondary users may not voluntarily contribute to desired cooperative sensing. We design the first fully distributed scheme to incentivize participation of nodes in cooperative sensing, by connecting sensing and spectrum allocation, and offering incentive from latter to the former. Secondary users that are more active and report more accurate sensing values will be given higher reputation values, which results in lower prices in the spectrum allocation phase. Theoretical analysis and simulation results indicate that the proposed method effectively incentivizes sensing participation, and rewards truthful and accurate reporting. Our proposed system is fully distributed and does not rely on a central authority, and so is more applicable in dynamic cognitive radio networks in practice. We also show how to improve the robustness of reputation when malicious nodes report spurious reputation.