Game Theoretic Issues in Cognitive Radio Systems (Invited Paper)

The ability to model independent decision makers whose actions potentially affect all other decision makers makes game theory attractive to analyze the performances of wireless communication systems. Recently, there has been growing interest in adopting game theoretic methods to cognitive radio networks for power control, rate adaptation and channel access schemes. This work presents several results in game theory and their applications in cognitive radio systems. First, we compute the Nash equilibrium power allocation and rate adaptation policies in cognitive radio systems using static game and dynamic Markovian game frameworks. We then describe how mechanism design helps to design a truth revealing channel access scheme. Finally, we introduce the correlated equilibrium concept in stochastic games and its application to solve the transmission control problem in a cognitive radio system.