A Truthful Double Auction Framework for Promoting Femtocell Access

Abstract

With the explosive growth of mobile data traffic in cellular networks, indoor users are always suffering poor data services. Femtocells are widely accepted as an effective way to solve this problem by providing better coverage. In this way, the user quality of service (QoS) can be significantly enhanced. However, a major obstacle to implement the fashion is lacking market-driven mechanisms to incentivize femtocell owners to trade their access permissions (ACPs). Therefore, designing a robust auction mechanism for ACP trading has attracted lots of attention. A critical challenge of designing such an auction mechanism is to ensure the economic property of truthfulness. Most of the prior works on this issue focus on single-sided scenario, where there is only one seller or one buyer. However, multiple femtocells and multiple macrocell users equipments (MUEs) are always involved in practical systems. In this paper, we study a general market model where multiple femtocells can trade with multiple MUEs and show that designing such a truthful auction mechanism for this scenario is challenging. Therefore, we propose a truthful double auction for access permission (TDAP) allocation. We show analytically that our auction mechanism is economic robust (i.e., satisfying three economic properties including truthfulness, individually rationality, and budget balance) and computationally efficient. Moreover, through extensive simulation experiments, we show TDAP can highly improve auction efficiency outperforming prior auction design.