Truthful Spectrum Auctions With Approximate Social-Welfare

In cellular networks, a recent trend is to make spectrum access dynamic in the spatial and temporal dimensions, for the sake of efficient utilization of spectrum. In such a model, the spectrum is divided into channels and periodically allocated to competing base stations using an auction-based market mechanism. An efficient auction mechanism is essential to the success of such a dynamic spectrum access model. Two of the key objectives of an efficient auction mechanism are, viz., “truthfulness” (which encourages bidders to truthfully declare their true valuations), and maximizing “social-welfare” (i.e., the total valuation, so that the spectrum is allocated to the bidders who value it the most). Prior works on design of spectrum auction mechanism have only addressed one of the above objectives, and in limited contexts. In this article, we design a spectrum auction mechanism that is truthful and yields an allocation that has a social-welfare of within a constant-factor of the optimal. We consider general (pairwise and physical) interference and bidding models. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to design a spectrum auction mechanism satisfying both the above mentioned objectives. We demonstrate the performance of our designed technique through simulations over random and real cellular networks.