An Indirect-Reciprocity Reputation Game for Cooperation in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

Cooperation is a promising approach to simultaneously achieve efficient utilization of spectrum resource and improve the quality of service of primary users in dynamic spectrum access networks. However, due to the selfish nature, secondary users may not act as cooperatively as primary users have expected. Therefore, how to stimulate the secondary users to play cooperatively is an important issue. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based spectrum access framework, where the cooperation stimulation problem is modeled as an indirect reciprocity game. In the proposed game, secondary users choose how to help primary users relay information and gain reputations, based on which they can access a certain amount of vacant licensed channels in the future. By formulating a secondary user´s decision making as a Markov decision process, we obtain the optimal action rule, according to which the secondary user will use maximal power to help primary user relay data if the channel is not in an outage, and thus greatly improve the primary user´s quality of service as well as the spectrum utilization efficiency. Moreover, we prove the uniqueness of stationary reputation distribution and theoretically derive the condition under which the optimal action rule is evolutionarily stable. Finally, simulation results are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.