Notice and Invitation Oral Defense of Doctoral Dissertation The Volgenau School of Engineering, George Mason University Zheng Wang Master of Science, Tsinghua University, 2012 Bachelor of Science, Tsinghua University, 2008 Resource Allocation for Cognitive Radio Networks with Cooperative Relaying Thursday, December 3, 2020, 8:00 AM EST All are invited to attend. Committee Dr. Brian L. Mark, Chair Dr. Yariv Ephraim Dr. Song Min Kim Dr. Kai Zeng Zoom Meeting Details: Link to the Zoom Webinar: https://gmu.zoom.us/j/99577386947 Abstract Resource allocation is a key issue to efficiently utilize the spectrum in wireless communication systems. A promising technology for efficient spectrum usage, cognitive radio (CR), allows the secondary users (SUs) to make use of the spectrum that has been assigned to the licensed users, also known as primary users (PUs). The spectrum can be accessed by SUs as long as the PUs are idle or the interference caused by the SUs is below some threshold. In this dissertation, we investigate three issues in spectrum resource allocation for cognitive radio networks (CRNs). First, we adopt a Gaussian random field model (GRFM) to approximate the radius of an exlusion zone to protect PUs from SU interference. This approach allows us to find the coverage of exclusion zone using limited observations of signal power and interference received by the SUs. Second, we propose a novel Stackelberg-game based framework to model the behavior of SUs and PUs in cooperative relaying, and design hybrid scheduling algorithms to solve the resource allocation problem in CRNs. Numerical results show that significant improvement in terms of CRN system capacity can be achieved under cooperative relaying. Third, we propose a hierarchical Stackelberg game/mean field game framework to coordinate the behavior of the cognitive devices and control transmit power under cooperative relaying, and develop a finite difference method for determining the optimal power control scheme in this setting.