Secure Cooperative Spectrum Trading in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Reversed Stackelberg Approach

In cognitive radio networks, spectrum trading between primary and secondary users can be used to improve spectrum utilization. Most of previous work on spectrum trading does not consider security issues. One crucial assumption behind cooperative spectrum trading is that the radio nodes can always be trusted. However, this assumption may not be valid in some networks, especially in hostile environments. In this paper, we propose a secure cooperative spectrum trading scheme based on a reversed Stackelberg game. In our proposed model, the primary user can supervise whether the secondary user cooperates or not and detect the compromised actions. A supervising-cooperating mechanism is introduced to punish the compromised nodes. Numerical results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.