In cognitive radio networks, the primary user (PU) can lease a fraction of its licensed spectrum to the secondary users (SUs) in exchange for their cooperative transmission if it has a minimum transmission rate requirement and is experiencing a bad channel condition. However, due to the selfish nature of the SUs, they may not cooperate to meet the PU's Quality of Service (QoS) requirement. On the other hand, the SUs may not exploit efficiently the benefit from cooperation if they compete with each other and collaborate with the PU independently. Therefore, when SUs belong to the same organization and can work as a group, how to stimulate them to cooperate with the PU and thus guarantee the PU's QoS requirement, and how to coordinate the usage of rewarded spectrum among these SUs after cooperation are critical challenges. In this paper, we propose a two-level bargaining framework to address the aforementioned problems. In the proposed framework, the interactions between the PU and the SUs are modeled as the upper level bargaining game while the lower level bargaining game is used to formulate the SUs' decision making process on spectrum sharing. We analyze the optimal actions of the users and derive the theoretic results for the one-PU one-SU scenario. To find the solutions for the one-PU multi-SU scenario, we put forward a revised numerical searching algorithm and prove its convergence. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme through simulations.

The Internet is composed of many distinct networks, operated by independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The traffic and economic relationships of ISPs are mainly decided by their routing policies. However, in today's Internet, overlay routing, which changes traffic routing at the application layer, is rapidly increasing and this challenges the validity of ISPs' existing agreements. We study here the economic implications of overlay routing for ISPs, using an ISP interconnection business model based on a simple network. We then study the overlay traffic patterns in the network under various conditions. Combining the business model and traffic patterns, we study the ISPs' cost reductions with Bill-and-Keep peering and paid peering. We also discuss the ISPs' incentive to upgrade the network under each peering strategy.

Efficient resource allocation for delay-sensitive traffic, such as telephony and video streaming, in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) networks is needed to increase system performance. In our system, users try to achieve a low queuing delay and buffer space usage by competing for transmission over the subchannels. We formulate this problem as a bargaining game and use the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) to realize a fair and efficient subchannel allocation for the users. Simulation results show performance improvements, with regard to packet dropping and delay distribution, over other algorithms.