Dynamic Coalition Formation for Resource Allocation in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio networks (CRN) are promising to enrich the connectivity demand of users through exploiting the under-utilized licensed bands. In this paper, the load-balanced resource allocation problem is formulated as a non-superadditive coalition formation game in which the cognitive radios (CR) form collaborative groups to exploit the spectrum available to cognitive base stations (CBS) most efficiently. A distributed decision-making framework is developed for coalition formation among CRs that converges to the core of the defined game, corresponding to the maximum average payoff conditional on feasibility and subject to a fairness rule. Further, we elaborate on the load balancing properties of the proposed scheme and demonstrate its superior performance, when compared to opportunistic scheduling, through numerical examples.