Towards Cheat-Proof Cooperative Relay for Cognitive Radio Networks

In cognitive radio networks, cooperative relay is a new technology that can significantly improve spectrum efficiency and system throughput. While the existing protocols for cooperative relay are very interesting and useful, there is a crucial problem that has not been investigated: In reality, selfish users may cheat incooperative relay, in order to benefit themselves. Here by cheating we mean the behavior of reporting misleading information to other users. Such cheating behavior may harm other users and thus lead to poor system throughput. Given the threat of selfish users' cheating, our objective in this paper is to suppress the cheating behavior of selfish users in cooperative relay. Hence, we design the first cheat proof scheme for cooperative relay incognitive radionetworks, and rigorously prove that under our scheme, selfish users have incentives to faithfully follow the protocol. Our design and analysis start in the model of strategic game for interactions among secondary users; then they are extended to the entire cooperative replay process, which can be mode led as an extensive game. Results of extensive simulations demonstrate that our scheme suppresses cheating behavior and thus improves the system through put in face of selfish users.