Towards Flexible and Truthful Incentive for Multichannel Allocation in DSA

Abstract

Due to its potential of increasing spectrum utilization, dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a promising platform to solve the so-called spectrum shortage problem, caused by a huge proliferation of wireless applications and services. Because of good allocation efficiency and fairness, auction based mechanisms have been extensively studied in DSA, in which truthfulness is a critical property to guarantee that each bidder can obtain her maximal utility by bidding with her true valuation of bidding spectrum. However, existing spectrum auction mechanisms on homogenous channels strictly require bidders to bid one channel or multiple channels with continuous demands, and does not consider the noncontinuous demands for channels. In this paper, we propose THIMBLE, the first TrutHful Incentive Mechanism for flexiBle muLtichannEl allocation by considering bidders’ continuous/noncontinuous demands for channels and spatial reusability. Specifically, bidders using the same channel without interference are formulated to a group, and a group bid recalculation method is presented for noncontinuous group bids. Next, a winner selection and charging method based on group bids is designed to achieve truthfulness. Extensive simulation results show that THIMBLE achieves not only truthfulness in continuous and noncontinuous channel demand cases, but also as good spectrum allocation efficiency as existing spectrum auction mechanisms.