Truthful Auction Mechanism Design for Short-Interval Secondary Spectrum Access Market

Abstract

Exploitation of short-interval spectrum availability offers an opportunity to better utilize spectrum for wireless communications. One significant class of short-interval secondary spectrum (SiSS) markets involves a primary license holder (PLH) renting out homogeneous spectrum units to a few competing Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs). This paper presents a design of SiSS market framework with brokerage services that mitigate information asymmetry and host auctions. The novel SiSS auction design is single-round and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction-based and integrates two innovations. The first is a highly expressive bidding format that allows maximum bidding options to MVNOs in single submission. The second is a virtual bidder by the broker, whose bids are based on PLH's specification of per-unit reserve price, to avoid MVNOs' consideration of undesirable bidding strategies and guarantee that per-unit payment be no less than the reserve price. Such a design exploits the truthfulness of VCG and further achieves individual rationality and budget balance. Numerical experimentation shows that SiSS auction generates in average 31.3% higher per-unit revenue than VCG. For a SiSS market of 200 MVNOs and 500 spectrum units, computation time of clearing auction is within 15 seconds. These designs suit for SiSS applications in time efficiency and economic considerations.