Optimal Pricing Strategies in Cognitive Radio Networks With Multiple Spectrums

A vast body of literature usually has treated cognitive radio (CR) networks as single-band queues with preemptive priority for mathematical tractability, although, in practice, they are multiple-spectrum CR systems. In this article, we overcome these restrictions and employ a two-server preemptive priority queue to study CR systems with multiple spectrums. We obtain a joint optimal pricing strategy to maximize profit for the service provider (SP), as well as an optimal pricing strategy to maximize social welfare from the social administrator's viewpoint. We find that the socially optimal pricing strategy is to provide free service for all PUs, whereas the joint optimal pricing strategy for SP's maximum is equivalent to the pricing strategy that maximizes the two servers' own expected net benefit.