View article

In order to maintain a conflict-free environment among licensed primary users (PUs) and unlicensed secondary users (SUs) in cognitive radio networks, providing frequency and geographical information through control channels, such as the cognitive pilot channel (CPC), has been recently proposed. While existing literature focused on the type of information that these control channels need to carry, this paper investigates the problem of gathering this information cooperatively, among a network of secondary base stations (SBSs). In this regard, given a cognitive network where every SBS can only have accurate knowledge on a small number of different primary users (PUs) or channels, each SBS can cooperate with neighboring SBSs in order to improve its view of the spectrum, i.e., learn about new PUs that can subsequently be used by its served SUs. We model the problem as a hedonic coalition formation game …