Dealing with the Untrustworthy Auctioneer in Combinatorial Spectrum Auctions

Abstract

Spectrum auction is an enabling approach to drastically improving the spectrum utilization to satisfy the ever increasing service demands in wireless networks. However, the behaviors of the untrustworthy auctioneer (i.e., the frauds of the untrustworthy auctioneer and the bid-rigging between the greedy bidders and the insincere auctioneer) pose significant design challenges. In this paper, we propose a secure combinatorial spectrum auction (SCSA) by using homomorphic encryption to deal with the untrustworthy auctioneer. SCSA computes and reveals the results of spectrum auction while the actual bidding values are kept confidential. By taking frequency reuse and interference constraints into consideration, we also incorporate a corresponding procedure to implement the combinatorial spectrum auction. It has been shown that SCSA can effectively thwart the back-room dealing without much performance degradation.