Information Sharing in Spectrum Auction for Dynamic Spectrum Access

Abstract

Spectrum under-utilization is one of the bottlenecks of the development of wireless communication, and dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is envisioned as a novel mechanism to solve the problem of spectrum scarcity. Spectrum auction has been recognized as an effective way to achieve DSA, wherein the primary spectrum owner (PO) acts as an auctioneer who has free channels and is willing to sell them for additional revenue, and the secondary user (SU) acts as a bidder who is willing to buy a channel from POs for its service. In this paper, we adopt a progressive spectrum auction named MAP, which has been proved optimal and incentive compatible in DSA networks with distributed POs and SUs. However, in MAP, the profit of POs is not maximized under the equilibrium point due to the scarcity of SUs' private information known by POs. We propose an information sharing mechanism, in which the POs exchange their local information with each other. We show analytically that, allowing information sharing, each PO is able to learn the private information of SUs and increase its profit accordingly. Long term profit acts as the incentive for information sharing that all the POs automatically reveal the true information when they are aware of this. It is notable that information sharing doesn't affect social optimality. Simulation shows the increase of POs' profits in the sense of long term interests.