Auction-based resource allocation for cooperative cognitive radio networks

Cooperative cognitive radio network (CCRN) is a promising paradigm to increase spectrum utilization and exploit spatial diversity. The allocation of two coupled resources, i.e. spectrum and secondary relay nodes, plays a fundamental role in the performance of CCRNs. However, previous studies either lack of incentives for both primary users (PUs) and relay nodes to participate in or consider spectrum auction and relay auction separately. In this paper, we consider a static cooperative cognitive radio network scenario with several PUs and multiple secondary user coteries, each of which consists of a set of secondary users who are interested in sharing the same secondary relay node. We model the problem of joint spectrum allocation and relay allocation as a hierarchical auction and propose two auction schemes, i.e. TERA and UERA. TERA is the first Truthful auction mechanism for Efficient Resource Allocation in CCRNs which satisfies critical economic properties. UERA is an approximate truthful scheme which adopts a uniform price for fairness in the same secondary user coteries. Furthermore, we theoretically prove TERA and UERA can achieve near-optimal revenue. Finally, extensive simulation results show that TERA and UERA are efficient and able to improve the utility of PUs and relay nodes significantly.