Cognitive radio is a revolutionary wireless communication paradigm in which cognitive users are able to observe, learn, optimize, and intelligently adapt in order to improve spectrum utilization without interfering with traditionally licensed users. In order to make this vision a reality, major technical challenges must be tackled at different levels, such as spectrum sensing, dynamic spectrum access, and exploration & exploitation. Due to their inherently distributed nature, future cognitive radio networks and protocol architectures should be self-organizing and collaborative so as to overcome the above challenges. In this respect, game theory is a powerful and flexible mathematical tool suitable to study how autonomous users can interact and cooperate with each other. This talk investigates the cooperative and competitive relations among individual distributed cognitive users, based on a variety of approaches that can cope with time-varying channel/traffic conditions, heterogeneous user profiles, different QoS requirements, and security. In particular, three categories of cooperative games are studied: canonical coalitional game, coalitional formation game, and coalitional graph game. Examples on applying those game theoretical tools within the area of cognitive radio design will be thoroughly studied.
Zhu Han received the B.S. degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, in 1997, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. From 2000 to 2002, he was an R&D Engineer of JDSU, Germantown, Maryland. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Research Associate at the University of Maryland. From 2006 to 2008, he was an assistant professor in Boise State University, Idaho. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Houston, Texas. His research interests include wireless resource allocation and management, wireless communications and networking, game theory, wireless multimedia, and security. Dr. Han is an NSF CAREER award recipient 2010. Dr. Han has several conference best paper awards, and winner of Fred W. Ellersick Prize 2011.