STRUCTURE: A Strategyproof Double Auction for Heterogeneous Secondary Spectrum Markets

Abstract

Auction has been regarded as one of the promising methods for the scarce resources allocation due to its fairness. Thus, spectrum auction is an efficient way to allocate licensed spectrum to new demanders for mitigating the spectrum scarcity. Most of the existing studies assume that the spectrum resources are homogeneous. However, spectrums with different frequencies are intrinsically heterogeneous due to their different licensed areas and interference ranges. In this paper, we concentrate on the heterogeneity of spectrum resources and propose a strategyproof double auction mechanism STRUCTURE. The STRUCTURE assumes that all the buyers are selfish and rational, and they will submit their bids for each interested spectrum. To achieve the strategyproofness, many existing double spectrum auction mechanisms adopt the bid-independent methods to construct buyer groups, which may cause unfairness for the buyers with high bid values. To tackle this, we turn to choose a bid-related buyer group construction algorithm, which is more suitable for the laws of market and can further avoid the collusion between buyers. After that, we propose a collusion-free allocation mechanism and a bid-independent payment mechanism to ensure the strategyproofness for both buyers and sellers. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism significantly improves the spectrum utilization with low running time. Furthermore, we also find that the buyers with higher bid values have a higher winning ratio than the buyers with low bids in the STRUCTURE.