FlexAuc: Serving Dynamic Demands in a Spectrum Trading Market With Flexible Auction

In secondary spectrum trading markets, auctions are widely used by spectrum holders (SHs) to redistribute their unused channels to secondary wireless service providers (WSPs). As sellers, the SHs design proper auction schemes to stimulate more participants and to maximize the revenue from the auction. As buyers, the WSPs determine the bidding strategies in the auction to better serve their end users. In this paper, we consider a three-layered spectrum trading market consisting of the SH, the WSPs, and the end users. We jointly study the strategies of the three parties. The SH determines the auction scheme and spectrum supplies to optimize its revenue. The WSPs have flexible bidding strategies in terms of both demands and valuations considering the strategies of the end users. For this market, we design a novel auction mechanism called FlexAuc to enable dynamic supplies and demands in the auction. We theoretically prove that FlexAuc not only maximizes the social welfare but also preserves other nice properties such as truthfulness and computational tractability.