A Stackelberg game spectrum sharing scheme in cognitive radio-based heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we focus on spectrum sharing in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) and consider Stackelberg game exploiting the cognitive radio (CR) technology to utilize those scarce resources. In the game, the licensed network controls and prices the available spectrum resource which the WSN relay: actor nodes can purchase and use to serve the attached sensor nodes as well as offload some nodes in licensed network. Both kinds of nodes try to maximize their own utility which is consisted of data rates, earning and expenditures on spectrum trading. During the dynamic interaction of the game, the interference coordination features of the heterogeneous sensor network and CR technology are employed so that the change of spectrum allocation can be fully exploited. According to simulation result, we evaluate the impact on throughput performance after implementing proposed game strategy in HWSN. And we prove that the proposed approach can significantly improve the throughput of victim licensed nodes with slightly decreasing network total throughput. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.