Contemporary Engineering Sciences, Vol. 7, 2014, no. 29, 1633 - 1639 HIKARI Ltd, www.m-hikari.com http://dx.doi.org/10.12988/ces.2014.411220 Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Games for Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Comparative Study Shelly Salim, Cheolheon Baek, Sangman Moh and Ilyong Chung Dept. of Computer Engineering, Chosun University Gwangju, Republic of Korea Copyright © 2014 Shelly Salim, Cheolheon Baek, Sangman Moh, and Ilyong Chung. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Spectrum sharing in cognitive radio networks is essential to ensure effective communication between secondary users. Game theory is suitable to be applied to the spectrum sharing strategies since it considers strategic interactions between users. There are two types of games based on the ability to communicate between users: cooperative game and non-cooperative game. In this paper, the two spectrum sharing methods using cooperative and non-cooperative games are analyzed and compared. The numerical analysis shows that both the cooperative game and the non-cooperative game have their own best operation environment, in terms of the secondary user population. Keywords: Cognitive radio network, spectrum sharing, game theory, cooperative game, non-cooperative game 1 Introduction In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), all or some of wireless devices are equipped with cognitive radios. Cognitive radios are aware of their surroundings and able to respond accordingly to the variations of the environment in a real-time