Preference-based spectrum pricing in dynamic spectrum access networks

With market-driven secondary spectrum trading, licensed users can receive benefits in terms of monetary rewards or various transmission services, thus setting a fair pricing structure by suitably defining spectrum quality characteristics and accurately addressing participant’s requirement is a key issue. In this paper, we investigate the pricing-based spectrum access by casting the problem of spectrum pricing into a Hotelling game model according to spectrum quality diversity. Particularly, we first build a pricing system model where unused spectrum from primary systems with different qualities forms a spectrum pool and can be divided into a number of uniform channels. A secondary user purchases a channel for usage according to its selection preference which is closely related to the channel quality and spectrum evaluation. The secondary user not only needs to consider the channel’s quality and price, but also the interference cost on primary system. Detailed analysis on the policy preference of both primary system and secondary buyer are provided. By forming a game problem of spectrum pricing between primary and secondary users, we apply the Hotelling game model to handle the interaction between the participants. Specifically, by fixing Nash equilibrium of the game, an iterative algorithm for spectrum pricing is proposed based on the distribution characteristics of secondary user’s preference. Essential analysis for the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium along with algorithm’s convergence conditions are provided. Numerical results are also supplemented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in ensuring spectrum owner’s profit.