CAREER: Mutual Benefit in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Coalitional Game Framework

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Cognitive radio (CR) is a revolutionary wireless communication paradigm in which cognitive (secondary) users are able to observe, learn, optimize, and intelligently adapt for spectrum utilization without interfering with traditionally licensed (primary) users. Yet, the major technical challenges remain: First, to avoid interfering with primary users, the cognitive users must explore and sense the spectrum opportunities to determine whether there are ongoing activities before data transmission. Second, a critical issue is dynamic and opportunistic resource allocation over time-varying heterogeneous interfering environments. Third, due to hardware limitation, each cognitive user should distributively choose the candidate channels to either sense or access (i.e., exploration and exploitation). To overcome these challenges, the novel cooperative game theory methods are employed that emphasizes mutual benefit management with simple distributed solutions. For different problems and scenarios, this research project investigates three categories of cooperative games: Canonical Coalition Game, Coalition Formation Game, and Coalition Graph Game. The schemes and frameworks are implemented using the hardware/software platform in the newly established Wireless Networking, Signal Processing, and Security Lab at the University of Houston. The expected research results are publicly available for other researchers worldwide through conference/journal publications and via shared codes on the lab website. The education plan focuses on an outreach program that integrates campus summer camps for high school-age women/minority students. It also engages graduate and undergraduate students in research. The goal of this project is to improve CR network performance through the game theoretic point of view and to enhance women/minority participation in engineering.