Proposed Auction Scheme Research Articles

Towards Differential Privacy-Based Online Double Auction for Smart Grid

In this paper, to address the issue of demand response in the smart grid with island MicroGrids (MGs), we introduce an effective and secure auction market that allows electric vehicles (EVs) having surplus energy to act as sellers, and the EVs having insufficient energy in the island MGs to act as buyers. There are two primary challenges in designing an effective auction market in the smart grid. First, the auction market scheme shall be online, allowing buyers and sellers to enter the market at any time, and satisfy several critical economic properties (individual rationality, incentive compatibility, and so on.). Second, the sensitive information of participants shall be protected in the auction process. To address these challenges, we present a novel privacy-preserving online double auction scheme based on differential privacy. In our auction market, the MicroGrid Center Controller (MGCC) acts as the auctioneer, aiming at solving the social welfare maximization problem to match buyers and sellers. The principle of differential privacy is leveraged to protect the privacy of EVs’ sensitive bidding information. Via theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that our designed auction scheme satisfies both economic and privacy-preserving properties, including individual rationality, incentive compatibility, weak budget balance, and $\varepsilon $ -differential privacy. We conduct an extensive performance evaluation to measure the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. Our experimental results show that the proposed auction scheme can not only ensure the privacy of participants but also effectively facilitates demand response in the smart grid, with respect to social welfare, satisfaction ratio, social efficiency, and computational overhead.

Auction-Based Pricing Schemes for Distributed Partner Selection in Cooperative Wireless Networks

In autonomous wireless networks, distributed and efficient partner selection is critical for fully realizing the benefits of cooperative communications. However, the selfish nodes in the networks bring catastrophe for partner selection when implementing cooperative transmissions. In order to stimulate cooperation and achieve distributed partner selection for such systems, an auction-based pricing scheme that considering efficiency and fairness is proposed in this paper. Two most prevalent auction forms, i.e., the second-price auction and the first-price auction, are both considered and analyzed in the single- and multiple-relay networks. In the single-relay scenario, the Nash equilibrium strategy for each auction is characterized, based on which the expected payoff and revenue for the source and relay are derived, respectively. Conclusions show that the same expected payoff is charged for the source with different auction schemes, and so is the expected revenue for the relay. Nonetheless, things are different in the multi-relay networks. With the linear 0–1 integer programming models, it is concluded that the first-price auction is more efficient than the second-price auction. Numerical results and analysis present that the proposed auction scheme efficiently solve the noncooperation issues of selfish nodes in autonomous wireless networks.

Dynamic Spectrum Access and Power Allocation for Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks

In the existing cooperative cognitive radio, primary users are generally assumed to be more than capable of supporting their target throughput, thereby the rate enhancement or the cooperation from secondary users actually has less attraction to primary users. Instead, they might be more interested in the benefits in other format. This paper presents a new cooperative cognitive radio framework, where primary users are willing to cooperatively relay data for secondary users with their under-utilized resource to earn the revenue. An auction model with multiple auctioneers, multiple bidders and hybrid divisible/indivisible commodities is proposed to solve channel bands and cooperative transmit power competitions among secondary users. For maximizing the utility, secondary users can select receiving primary user’s assistance (i.e., work in cooperative transmission mode) and purchase both spectrum and power from the primary user, or select direct transmission mode and just buy spectrum from the primary user. Then, the convergence of the proposed auction scheme to a Walrasian equilibrium is mathematically proved. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is verified by the simulation results.

Improving the secrecy rate by turning foes to allies: An auction scheme**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61271232 and 61372126) and the University Postgraduate Research and Innovation Project in Jiangsu Province, China (Grant No. CXZZ12-0472).

Security against eavesdroppers is a critical issue in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In this paper, a scenario consisting of one primary pair and multiple secondary pairs is considered. The secondary transmitters (STs) work in half-duplex mode and they are potential eavesdroppers on the primary transmission unless they are allowed to simultaneously transmit with the primary transmitter (PT). A modified second-price sealed-bid auction scheme is employed to model the interaction between the PT and STs. With the proposed auction scheme, the hostile relationship between the PT and STs is transformed into a cooperative relationship. An iterative algorithm based on the max–min criteria is proposed to find the optimal bidding power of the STs for an access chance in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. Numerical results show that the proposed auction scheme not only improves the PT’s security but also increases the access opportunities of the STs.

Combinatorial auction based spectrum allocation under heterogeneous supply and demand

In this paper, we apply the combinatorial auction scheme to solve the spectrum allocation problem under heterogeneous supply and demand in cognitive radio networks. The heterogeneity of spectrum is embodied via exploiting multiple attributes, based on which a valuation function is devised to evaluate the preference of an SU over a spectrum band. We first propose an auction scheme consisting of a greedy-like winner determination algorithm and a critical value based discriminatory pricing policy. We then extend the proposed auction scheme to a more challenging scenario by considering spectrum sharing among SUs. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that our auction schemes achieve individual rational, budget balance, value-truthfulness of SUs, and weak value-truthfulness of PUs. Our simulation results verify the advantage of combinatorial auction, the functionality of spectrum sharing and the economic robustness of our auction schemes.

A Parallel Repeated Auction for Spectrum Allocation in Distributed Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) is applied to solve spectrum scarcity. Although the auction theory and learning algorithm have been discussed in previous works, their combination is not yet researched in the distributed CR networks, where secondary users (SUs) can occupy several channels simultaneously by assuming that one channel can be accessed by at most one SU. A parallel repeated auction scheme is proposed to solve resource allocation in multi-user multi-channel distributed spectrum-overlay CR networks. A novel bid scheme in the light of the first-price sealed auction is designed to balance the system utility and allocation fairness. The proposed auction scheme can be developed based on a learning algorithm and be applied to the scenarios where the cooperation among SUs is unavailable. Under the assumption of limited entry budget, SUs can directly decide whether or not to participate in spectrum auction by comparing the possible bid with access threshold which can be applied into situations that SUs have different transmit power. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that, compared with original myopic scheme and original genie-aided scheme, the proposed auction scheme can obtain a considerable improvement in efficiency and fairness, especially with adequate available resources.