This SpringerBrief provides an overview of cognitive mobile virtual network operator's (C-MVNO) decisions under investment flexibility, supply uncertainty, and market competition in cognitive radio networks. This is a new research area at the nexus of cognitive radio engineering and microeconomics. The authors focus on an operator's joint spectrum investment and service pricing decisions. The readers will learn how to tradeoff the two flexible investment choices (dynamic spectrum leasing and spectrum sensing) under supply uncertainty. Furthermore, if there is more than one operator, we...

This brief presents research results on social cognitive radio networks, a transformational and innovative networking paradigm that promotes the nexus between social interactions and cognitive radio networks. Along with a review of the research literature, the text examines the key motivation and challenges of social cognitive radio network design. Three socially inspired distributed spectrum sharing mechanisms are introduced: adaptive channel recommendation mechanism, imitation-based social spectrum sharing mechanism, and evolutionarily stable spectrum access mechanism. The brief concludes...

This book examines the interaction between the technical and economic issues in database-assisted dynamic spectrum networks. It explains various business models for different network settings, analyzing the user behaviors and system equilibrium under each model.
With the explosive growth of mobile devices and bandwidth-hungry applications, radio spectrum is becoming increasingly congested and scarce. Database-assisted dynamic spectrum sharing is a promising technology for solving the problem of spectrum scarcity and congestion by allowing unlicensed mobile devices to dynamically access...

This SpringerBrief offers two concrete design examples for traffic offloading. The first is an optimal resource allocation for small-cell based traffic offloading that aims at minimizing mobile users' data cost. The second is an optimal resource allocation for device-to-device assisted traffic offloading that also minimizes the total energy consumption and cellular link usage (while providing an overview of the challenging issues). Both examples illustrate the importance of proper resource allocation to the success of traffic offloading, show the consequent performance advantages of executing...