Social Incentives for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Distributed Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Cooperative spectrum sensing has been considered as a promising approach to improve the sensing performance in distributed cognitive radio networks. However, there may exist some selfish secondary users (SUs) who are unwilling to cooperate. The presence of selfish SUs could cause catastrophic damage to the performance of cooperative spectrum sensing. Following the social perspective, we propose a Social Tie-based Incentive Scheme (STIS) to deal with the selfish problem for cooperative spectrum sensing in distributed cognitive radio networks. This scheme inspires SUs to contribute sensing information for the SUs who have social tie but not others, and such willingness varies with the strength of social tie value. The evaluation of each SU’s social tie derives from its contribution for others. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.