Fair Profit Allocation in the Spectrum Auction Using the Shapley Value

Microeconomics-inspired spectrum auctions can effectively improve the spectrum utilization for wireless networks to satisfy the ever increasing service demands. Considering the spatial reuse, the bidding nodes without mutual interference are grouped as virtual bidders competing for the spectrum bands, which turns a multi-winner spectrum auction into a traditional single-winner auction. To make the participating nodes bid truthfully, strategy-proof auctions are exploited to allocate the vacant spectrum bands. However, how to fairly allocate the profits of the virtual bidder among the winning bidders is still an imperative problem to solve. In this paper, we propose a shapley value based profit allocation (SPA) to distribute the profit among the bidding nodes according to their marginal contributions, which are both from helping the virtual bidder to win the auction and from generating the revenue during the auction period. Our simulation and analysis show that SPA can effectively integrate the contributions from the two stages in the spectrum auction and fairly allocate the profit among the winning bidders.