A Survey of Cooperative Games for Cognitive Radio Networks

Cooperative cognitive radio networks are new cognitive radio paradigm. Cooperative communication approaches, such as cooperative spectrum sensing and cooperative spectrum sharing, are playing key roles in the development of cognitive radio networks. To achieve the high performance, a cooperative cognitive communication framework is often used to model various cooperative spectrum sensing or sharing scenarios. However, its implementation faces numerous challenges due to the complexity of mobility and traffic models, the needs of dynamic spectrum access, the heterogeneous requirements from different users, and the distributed structure of the network. Fortunately, cooperative game theory can be used to formulate and model the interactions among licensed and unlicensed users for spectrum sensing and spectrum sharing to efficiently allocate spectrum resource in the highly dynamic and distributed radio environment. In this paper, we first present the cooperative communication technologies and describe their existing challenges, then introduce different game solutions, after that, we discuss several cooperative game strategies, and analyze the associated their applications in cognitive radio networks, at final, some open directions for future research on economic strategies in cooperative communication in cognitive radio networks are proposed.