Reputation-based coalitional games for spectrum allocation in distributed Cognitive Radio networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) technique is proved to be an efficient approach for mitigating the spectrum scarcity problem in wireless communications and spectrum allocation methods construct the foundation of such a technique. However, it will degrade the performance of CR when paying no attention to the behavior of second users (SUs) and their demands for spectrum attribute. In this paper, the spectrum allocation problem is first modeled as a coalition formation game, taking SUs reputation and requirements of spectrums into consideration. The rule named Assigning spectrum by probability among coalitions and by demand within coalitions is used to optimize the spectrum utilization and fairness when allocating spectrum among SUs. For each SU is equipped with an agent, a central authority is not needed and therefore the scheme can be more applicable in dynamic cognitive radio networks. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can efficiently improve the fairness and efficiency of spectrum allocation in CR context.