Spectrum Sharing Based on Truthful Auction in Licensed Shared Access Systems

Abstract

The explosion of different types of wireless communications is leading to an impending spectrum famine. As a result, spectrum sharing has gained increasing interest from governments, industry and regulators, such as FCC in US and CEPT in Europe. Licensed Shared Access (LSA), developed by CEPT and ETSI, is a concept for an efficient use of current spectrum resources to enable keeping pace with increasing mobile data usage demands. In this paper, we present a truthful auction mechanism for spectrum sharing based on the LSA concept. This proposal is to allocate Incumbents' idle spectrum to Licensee Access Points from different operators for the purpose of commerce. We give insights into spectrum allocation methods based on auction mechanisms to obtain high revenue to attract Incumbents to join in the LSA architecture and operators to offload data from primary spectrum band. The proposed LSA Auction (LSAA) mechanism combines independent set selection by bidding and an elaborately designed group bid called Rank-bid, which further improves the revenue compared to related allocation methods. Our simulation results show that LSAA results in enhanced performance for Incumbent revenue and Licensee satisfaction.