Game User-Oriented Multimedia Transmission Over Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Cognitive radio (CR) is an emerging technique to improve the efficiency of spectrum resource utilization. In CR networks, the selfish behavior of secondary users (SUs) can considerably affect the performance of primary users (PUs). Accordingly, game theory, which considers the game players’ selfish behavior, has been applied to the design of CR networks. Most of the existing studies focus on the network design only from the network perspective to improve system performance, such as utility and throughput. However, the users’ experience to the service, which cannot simply be reflected by quality of service, has been largely ignored. The user-perceived multimedia quality and service can be different from the actual received multimedia quality, and thus is very important to consider the network design. To better serve the network users, quality of experience (QoE) is adopted to measure the network service from the users’ perspective and help improve the users’ satisfaction to the CR network service. As CR networks require a lot of data storage and computation for spectrum sensing, spectrum sharing, and algorithm design, cloud computation comes as a convenient solution, because it can provide massive storage and fast computation. In this paper, we propose to design a user-oriented CR cloud network for multimedia applications, where the user’s satisfaction is reflected in the CR cloud network design. In the proposed framework, the PU and SU game is formulated as Stackelberg game. In particular, a refunding term is defined in the users’ utility function to effectively consider and to reflect the network users’ QoE requirement. Our contributions are twofold: 1) a game-based CR cloud network design for multimedia transmission is proposed, and the network user’s QoE requirement is satisfied in the design and 2) the existence and the uniqueness of the Stackelberg Nash equilibrium are proved, and the design is optimal. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the game user-oriented CR cloud network design.