Abstract-Radio spectrum resource is of fundamental importance for wireless communication. Recent reports show that most available spectrum has been allocated. While some of the spectrum bands (e.g., unlicensed band, GSM band) have seen increasingly crowded usage, most of the other spectrum resources are underutilized. This drives the emergence of open spectrum and dynamic spectrum access concepts, which allow unlicensed users equipped with cognitive radios to opportunistically access the spectrum not used by primary users. Cognitive radio has many advanced features, such as agilely sensing the existence of primary users and utilizing multiple spectrum bands simultaneously. However, in practice such capabilities are constrained by hardware cost. In this paper, we discuss how to conduct efficient spectrum management in ad hoc cognitive radio networks while taking the hardware constraints (e.g., single radio, partial spectrum sensing and spectrum aggregation limit) into consideration. A hardware-constrained cognitive MAC, HC-MAC, is proposed to conduct efficient spectrum sensing and spectrum access decision. We identify the issue of optimal spectrum sensing decision for a single secondary transmission pair, and formulate it as an optimal stopping problem. A decentralized MAC protocol is then proposed for the ad hoc cognitive radio networks. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed protocol.Index Terms-Cognitive MAC, open spectrum, optimal spectrum sensing, spectrum aggregation.

Abstract-Cognitive radio is a promising paradigm to achieve efficient utilization of spectrum resource by allowing the unlicensed users (i.e., secondary users, SUs) to access the licensed spectrum. Market-driven spectrum trading is an efficient way to achieve dynamic spectrum accessing/sharing. In this paper, we consider the problem of spectrum trading with single primary spectrum owner (or primary user, PO) selling his idle spectrum to multiple SUs. We model the trading process as a monopoly market, in which the PO acts as monopolist who sets the qualities and prices for the spectrum he sells, and the SUs act as consumers who choose the spectrum with appropriate quality and price for purchasing. We design a monopolist-dominated quality-price contract, which is offered by the PO and contains a set of qualityprice combinations each intended for a consumer type. A contract is feasible if it is incentive compatible (IC) and individually rational (IR) for each SU to purchase the spectrum with the quality-price intended for his type. We propose the necessary and sufficient conditions for the contract to be feasible. We further derive the optimal contract, which is feasible and maximizes the utility of the PO, for both discrete-consumer-type model and continuous-consumer-type model. Moreover, we analyze the social surplus, i.e., the aggregate utility of both PO and SUs, and we find that, depending on the distribution of consumer types, the social surplus under the optimal contract may be less than or close to the maximum social surplus.

Quality of Experience (QoE) is the perceptual Quality of Service (QoS) from the users' perspective. For video service, the relationship between QoE and QoS (such as coding parameters and network statistics) is complicated because users' perceptual video quality is subjective and diversified in different environments. Traditionally, QoE is obtained from subjective test, where human viewers evaluate the quality of tested videos under a laboratory environment. To avoid high cost and offline nature of such tests, objective quality models are developed to predict QoE based on objective QoS parameters, but it is still an indirect way to estimate QoE. With the rising popularity of video streaming over the Internet, data-driven QoE analysis models have newly emerged thanks to availability of large-scale data. In this article, we give a comprehensive survey of the evolution of video quality assessment methods, analyzing their characteristics, advantages and drawbacks. We also introduce QoE-based video applications, and finally identify the future research directions of QoE.Index Terms-Quality of Experience, Subjective Test, Objective Quality Model, Data-driven Analysis 1553-877X (c)

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In this paper, we tackle the problem of stimulating smartphone users to join mobile crowdsourcing applications with smartphones. Different from existing work of mechanism design, we uniquely take into consideration the crucial dimension of location information when assigning sensing tasks to smartphones. However, the location awareness largely increases the theoretical and computational complexity. In this paper, we introduce a reverse auction framework to model the interactions between the platform and the smartphones. We rigorously prove that optimally determining the winning bids is NP hard. In this paper we design a mechanism called TRAC which consists of two main components. The first component is a near-optimal approximate algorithm for determining the winning bids with polynomial-time computation complexity, which approximates the optimal solution within a factor of 1 + ln(n), where n is the maximum number of sensing tasks that a smartphone can accommodate. The second component is a critical payment scheme which, despite the approximation of determining winning bids, guarantees that submitted bids of smartphones reflect their real costs of performing sensing tasks. Through both rigid theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed mechanism achieves truthfulness, individual rationality and high computation efficiency.

Cooperative communication is a powerful technology combating fading in wireless medium. In contrast to conventional cooperation (CC) which allows the relay to simply process and forward what it has heard, network-coded cooperation (NCC) endows network coding capability with the relay, i.e., allows the relay to first encode the data it has received from different sources and then forward the network-coded data to corresponding destinations. In this paper we systematically investigate the performance of NCC in terms of diversitymultiplexing tradeoff as well as exact system outage behavior. Under the assumption (denoted as A) that each destination can reliably overhear the data from other sources, we prove the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff of NCC outperforms that of CC. Moreover, we derive the close form of the system outage probability of NCC as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The analytical and numerical results show that by requiring less bandwidth cost, NCC offers a similar or even reduced system outage probability compared with CC, and achieves the same full diversity order as CC at high SNR. Finally we discuss the performance of NCC in case the assumption A is removed. For a wireless network composed of N s-d pairs and a single relay, although there is a certain system outage probability increase for NCC, it still provides the same full diversity order of 2 as CC at high SNR, and has a diversity-multiplexing tradeoff superior to CC.

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