Incentives and Resource Sharing in Spectrum Commons

Abstract

Abstract-It has been suggested that light regulation in the form of etiquette protocols, device design and bargaining amongst users will suffice to mitigate a tragedy of the commons in unlicensed spectrum. In this paper we propose a game theoretic model to examine this claim. In this game, each user decides whether or not to set up an access point, which operates on a particular (single) band. The effect of regulation is modeled in reduced form through transfers. A user who sets up an access point, provides payments to each neighbor who does not and suffers a disutility depending on the number of interfering access points. A user who does not set up an access point, receives payments from each neighbor that does. For a suitable model of payoffs, the game is a potential game and best response updates converge to a Nash equilibrium of the game. For any interference parameters, there is a suitable transfer resulting in a Nash equilibrium which is efficient. However, all Nash equilibria may not be efficient.

A survey on the spectrum trading in dynamic spectrum access networks

“…As the users have equal rights to access the spectrum, it is difficult to avoid the interference between the users transmitting on the same channels, which leads to the packet collisions and high rate of packet retransmission, thus decreasing the overall network throughput. Different centralised and distributed spectrum sharing strategies designed to minimise the interference problem were investigated in [10], [11] and [12].…”

On oligopoly spectrum allocation game in cognitive radio networks with capacity constraints

“…[28] studies a revenue maximization problem in a Stackelberg game, where spectrum owner, primary users and secondary users are the players for opportunistic spectrum access. Besides, authors in [27] build a game theoretic model to investigate whether light regulation in the form of etiquette protocols, device design and bargaining amongst users can avoid the tragedy of common in unlicensed spectrum. In terms of nonlinear dynamics in the economics, authors in [15] have shown that the bounded rationality can cause chaotic behaviors in a Cournot duopoly.…”