Coalitional Game Theory based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in CRNs

Abstract

Spectrum sensing is a key functionality of Cognitive Radio to detect the availability of Primary User (PU) in a licensed band. However, the local sensing performance of Cognitive Radio users is adversely affected by the issues like multi-path fading, shadowing, and receiver uncertainty problem. These issues can be addressed by Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS). In this work, we have proposed a distributed Cooperative Spectrum Sensing scheme using Coalitional Game theoretic model for Cognitive Radio Networks which contributes to improve the sensing performance in terms of detection probability. The utility function of the game is formulated considering the trade-off between gain and cost during coalition formation. It is also proved that the proposed game model has a non-transferable utility amongst the players and the algorithm terminates in finite time with formation of stable coalitions. A simulation study has been carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.