Contract-based cooperative spectrum sharing

Abstract

Providing proper economic incentives is essential for the success of dynamic spectrum sharing. Cooperative spectrum sharing is one effective way to achieve this goal. In cooperative spectrum sharing, secondary users (SUs) relay traffics for primary users (PUs), in exchange for dedicated transmission time for the SUs' own communication needs. In this paper, we study the cooperative spectrum sharing under incomplete information, where SUs' types (capturing their heterogeneity in relay channel gains and evaluations of power consumptions) are private information and not known by PUs. Inspired by the contract theory, we model the network as a labor market. The single PU is the employer who offers a contract to the SUs. The contract consists of a set of contract items representing combinations of spectrum accessing time (i.e., reward) and relaying power (i.e., contribution). The SUs are employees, and each of them selects the best contract item to maximize his payoff. We study the optimal contract design for both weak and strong incomplete information scenarios. First, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for feasible contracts in both scenarios. In the weak incomplete information scenario, we further derive the optimal contract that achieves the same maximum PU's utility as in the complete information benchmark. In the strong incomplete information scenario, we propose a Decompose-and-Compare algorithm that achieves a close-to-optimal contract. We future show that the PU's average utility loss due to the suboptimal algorithm and the strong incomplete information are both relatively small (less than 2% and 1.3%, respectively, in our numerical results with two SU types).

Combining Spot and Futures Markets: A Hybrid Market Approach to Dynamic Spectrum Access

“…as much as possible (see, e.g., Gao et al (2010), Duan et al (2011), Kalathil & Jain (2010)). In contrast to Pricing and Contracts, Auctions are one of the most common mechanisms used by the spot market, wherein buyers compete to obtain commodities by offering different bids.…”

Incentives in cooperative networks: a contract-theoretic perspective

“…The introduction of incentive mechanisms in cooperative networks has attracted attention in the literature [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. One popular approach is the use of gametheoretic techniques to introduce distributed pricing mechanisms in cooperative networks [5][6][7][8]11].…”

“…Another promising approach that has recently been studied is that of contract theory [15]. Contract theory has been used to study economic contracts between service providers as well as issues related to spectrum sharing [13,14] and relaying [9,10]. However, in the existing literature such as [9] and [10], they assume that the relay volunteer their services.…”

Improving Macrocell-Small Cell Coexistence Through Adaptive Interference Draining

“…We show that, due to the mutual interference, the utility achieved by any player is affected by the cooperative behavior of the other players in the network. As a result, the proposed small cell coalitional game is in partition form, which is a class of coalitional games significantly different than classical characteristic form games, widely studied in wireless networks [34], [35](and reference therein). We solve the considered game through the concept of a recursive core [38], a key solution concept for coalitional games in partition form.…”

“…Note that both interference draining and interference alignment involve operations which are jointly performed by mutual interferers, which, however, are uncoordinated. Therefore, it is clear that there is a need for novel cooperative strategies at the SBS level aimed at a dynamic reuse of the macrocell spatial and frequency resources, as recently suggested in [12], [21], [32][33][34][35].…”