On sellers' quantity games for dynamic spectrum sharing

The concept of cognitive radio (CR) technology is emerging as a new paradigm for designing next generation wireless networks with dynamic spectrum sharing. Game theory is one of key mathematical tools to model and analyze the spectrum sharing process. In this paper, an environment where multiple licensed service providers compete to sell spectrum to infrastructure based CR networks is investigated. We formulate the situation involving few sellers and a buyer as an oligopoly market. In contrast to commonly applied pricing games, we contribute a Cournot quantity game for sellers which has more efficient Nash equilibrium. As a result, the quantity game converges to higher profit with no collusion required between spectrum sellers. In practice, reducing the need of collusion can lead to a lightweight and distributed CR deployment. We demonstrate the advantage of enabling quantity games in both static and dynamic fashion.