Spectrum Resource Sharing in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks: A Noncooperative Game-Theoretic Approach With Correlated Equilibrium

Abstract

In this paper, with the aims of alleviating the pressure from the shortage of spectrum resource and addressing the inefficient spectrum utilization, we investigate the spectrum sharing for moving vehicles in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks (HVNs) consisting of the macrocells and the Road Side Units (RSUs) with Cognitive Radio (CR) technology. We first propose an incentive mechanism for encouraging macrocells to share spectrum resource with vehicle users, in which the CR-enabled RSUs perform sensing the spectrum availability in the surrounding urban environments. Furthermore, the downlink resource allocation for vehicle users associated with different RSUs is modeled as an n-person game and solved by designing a noncooperative game theoretic approach. By considering transmission power constraint of RSU and inter-RSU interference, the resource allocation and interference mitigation among RSUs are formulated via maximizing the overall utility in the HVNs. We design a game theoretical strategy optimization algorithm based on regret-matching and then derive the correlated equilibrium solution. Moreover, we propose a heuristic power control algorithm for further mitigating the inter-RSU interference in the noncooperative game based resource allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve the