Tran, Nguyen H.Hong, Choong SeonHan, ZhuLee, Sungwon2020-05-112020-05-1110/17/2013Copyright 2013 IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. This is a pre-print version of a published paper that is available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6635264. Recommended citation: Tran, Nguyen H., Choong Seon Hong, Zhu Han, and Sungwon Lee. "Optimal pricing effect on equilibrium behaviors of delay-sensitive users in cognitive radio networks." IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 31, no. 11 (2013): 2566-2579. doi: 10.1109/JSAC.2013.131134. This item has been deposited in accordance with the publisher copyright and licensing terms and with the author's permission.https://hdl.handle.net/10657/6477This paper studies price-based spectrum access control in cognitive radio networks, which characterizes network operators' service provisions to delay-sensitive secondary users (SUs) via pricing strategies. Based on the two paradigms of shared-use and exclusive-use dynamic spectrum access (DSA), we examine three network scenarios corresponding to three types of secondary markets. In the first monopoly market with one operator using opportunistic shared-use DSA, we study the operator's pricing effect on the equilibrium behaviors of self-optimizing SUs in a queueing system. We provide a queueing delay analysis with the general distributions of the SU service time and PU traffic using the renewal theory. In terms of SUs, we show that there exists a unique Nash equilibrium in a non-cooperative game where SUs are players employing individual optimal strategies. We also provide a sufficient condition and iteraIntive algorithms for equilibrium convergence. In terms of operators, two pricing mechanisms are proposed with different goals: revenue maximization and social welfare maximization. In the second monopoly market, an operator exploiting exclusive-use DSA has many channels that will be allocated separately to each entering SU. We also analyze the pricing effect on the equilibrium behaviors of the SUs and the revenue-optimal and socially-optimal pricing strategies of the operator in this market. In the third duopoly market, we study a price competition between two operators employing shared-use and exclusive-use DSA, respectively, as a two-stage Stackelberg game. Using a backward induction method, we show that there exists a unique equilibrium for this game and investigate the equilibrium convergence.Cognitive radio networksdynamic spectrum accessnetwork pricingqueueing analysisNash equilibriumStackelberg gameArticle