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.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems often use a cyclic prefix (CP) to simplify the equalization design at the cost of bandwidth efficiency. To increase the bandwidth efficiency, we study the blind equalization with linear smoothing [1] for single-input multiple-output (SIMO) OFDM systems without CP insertion in this paper. Due to the block Toeplitz structure of channel matrix, the block matrix scheme is applied to the linear smoothing channel estimation, which equivalently increases the number of sample vectors and thus reduces the perturbation of sample autocorrelation matrix. Compared with the linear smoothing and subspace methods, the proposed block linear smoothing requires the lowest computational complexity. Computer simulations show that the block linear smoothing yields a channel estimation error smaller than that from linear smoothing, and close to that of the subspace method. Evaluating by the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) equalizer, the block linear smoothing and subspace methods have nearly the same bit-error-rates (BERs).