Joint Pricing and Load Balancing for Cognitive Spectrum Access: Non-Cooperation Versus Cooperation

In the dynamic spectrum access (DSA), pricing is an efficient approach providing economic incentives for operators, whereas load balancing yields congestion-avoidance incentives for secondary users (SUs). Despite complexities of 1) the couplings among pricing, load balancing, and SUs´ spectrum access decision, and 2) the heterogeneity of primary users´ traffic and SUs classes/types, we tackle the joint load balancing and pricing problem to maximize operators´ revenue in two cognitive radio markets: monopoly and duopoly. For the monopoly market, we first show there exists a unique SUs´ equilibrium arrival rate to the monopolist´s channels. We then show that the joint problem can be solved efficiently by exploiting its convex structure. For the duopoly market, we first characterize a unique SUs´ equilibrium arrival rate to two operators employing different DSA approaches. When two operators are noncooperative, we show that there exists a unique Nash equilibrium for each operator´s revenue. When they are cooperative, we show that the social revenue optimization can achieve a unique optimal solution. Using the Nash bargaining framework, we also present a sharing contract that determines the optimal fraction of the social revenue for each operator. In both markets, we propose two algorithms that can find the largest SU class supportable by the operators.