Economic model for routing and spectrum management in cognitive wireless mesh network

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), unlicensed users (secondary users – SUs) lease free spectrum with quality of service (QoS) guarantees from a multitude of spectrum owners (primary users, PUs) based on service level agreements (SLA). Free spectrum is used to establish the links of secondary network. The amount of leased spectrum influences the admitted number of SU’s requests, PUs’ profits, and the cost of renting spectrum. Hence, the PU can maximise its profit by adapting its resources to the changes in the traffic load and SLA costs conditions. We propose a novel approach that maximizes PU’s profit using economic model. Our economic model integrates the network routing with the adaptation of the capacity of secondary network links. For SUs, QoS should be maintained while adapting the secondary network capacity. Our adaptation scheme is based on the profit maximisation. The Markov decision process (MDP) is used to derive the adaption scheme. Numerical results show the ability of the proposed scheme to attain the optimal profit under different conditions and constraints.