Auction-based spectrum sharing in cognitive radio networks with heterogeneous channels

Cognitive radio is a novel communication paradigm that can significantly improve spectrum utilization by allowing the cognitive radio users to dynamically utilize the licensed spectrum. To achieve this, studying efficient spectrum allocation mechanisms is imperative. In this paper, we consider a cognitive radio network consisting of a primary spectrum owner (PO), multiple primary users (PU) and multiple secondary users (SU). We design an auction-based spectrum sharing mechanism where the SUs bid to buy spectrum bands from the PO who acts as the auctioneer, selling idle spectrum bands to make a profit. Existing auction mechanisms assume that all the channels are identical. However, we consider a more general and more realistic case where channels have different qualities. Also, we allow SUs to express their preferences for each channel separately. That is, each SU submits a vector of bids, one for each channel. The proposed auction mechanism results in efficient allocation that maximizes SUs´ valuations, and it has desired economic properties that we formally prove in the analysis. In addition, numerical results show performance improvements in terms of social welfare, SUs´ utilities and PO´s revenue, compared to the case of identical channels.