Auction mechanisms for Licensed Shared Access

Abstract

Licensed shared access (LSA) is a new approach that allows Mobile Network Operators to use a portion of the spectrum initially licensed to another incumbent user, by obtaining a license from the regulator via an auction mechanism. In this context, different truthful auction mechanisms have been proposed, and differ in terms of allocation (who gets the spectrum) but also on revenue. Since those mechanisms could generate an extremely low revenue, we extend them by introducing a reserve price per bidder which represents the minimum amount that each winning bidder should pay. Since this may be at the expense of the allocation fairness, for each mechanism we find by simulation the reserve price that optimizes a trade-off between expected fairness and expected revenue. Also, for each mechanism, we analytically express the expected revenue when valuations of operators for the spectrum are independent and identically distributed from a uniform distribution.