A Congestion-Game Based Scheme for Handoff Management in Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper presents a congestion based game scheme for reactive handoff management in cognitive radio networks. In these networks, Secondary users as the rational decision makers aim to maximize their utility, considering the status of primary channels and the contention regions for each channel. We formulate a multi-objective optimization problem in which the proposed cost function for secondary users considers the quality, price and handoff cost of the selected channel. This type of pricing scheme not only manages the cost, but also avoids the secondary users from all selecting the same set of channels; hence reduces the congestion in high quality channels. The target channel for handoff is selected according to the spatial contention between secondary users. This target channel has the minimum cost in terms of congestion level, financial cost and switching probability. Simulation results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in two scenarios. The first scenario ignores the pricing method while the second consider the price of each channel in its decision making process These two proposed scenarios have been compared with a recent scheme.