TAMES: A Truthful Double Auction for Multi-Demand Heterogeneous Spectrums

To accommodate the soaring mobile broadband traffic, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. sets out to retrieve under-utilized spectrum (e.g., TV Whitespace) and lay the groundwork for spectrum redistribution. Auction is an efficient way to allocate resources to those who value them the most. The large pool of spectrums to be released, especially the ones in TV Whitespace, consist of wide-range frequencies. Apart from spatial reuse, spectrum heterogeneity imposes new challenges for spectrum auction design: 1) Wireless service providers with different targeted cell coverages have different spectrum frequency preferences; 2) interference relationship is frequency-dependent due to frequency-selective signal fading. Unfortunately, existing spectrum auction mechanisms either assume spectrum valuation is homogeneous or use homogeneous interference graph to group buyers who can reuse the same spectrum. In this paper, we propose TAMES, an auction framework for heterogeneous spectrum transaction. We consider a multi-seller-multi-buyer double auction, in which every buyer submits a bid, consisting of the spectrum demand and a bidding profile of prices for spectrums contributed by all sellers. A novel buyer grouping approach is proposed to tackle the problem of heterogeneous interference graph. TAMES is proved to be truthful as well as individually rational. The simulation results show that TAMES significantly improves spectrum utilization, sellers´ revenue and buyers´ utility by making smart use of spectrum heterogeneity, while keeping low running time comparable with existing auction mechanisms. Moreover, via simulation, we show how to help buyers obtain continuous spectrums which further improves buyers´ satisfaction.