LOTUS: Location-Aware Online Truthful Double Auction for Dynamic Spectrum Access

In the spectrum auction, if a buyer locates in a “critical” place, interfering with a lot of other buyers, his occupancy of the spectrum may deprive many other transmission opportunities. In this paper, we propose a Location-aware Online Truthful doUble auction Scheme (LOTUS), which incorporates the buyers´ location information into auction mechanism design. In the online auction, the biggest challenge is how to allocate the spectrums based on the knowledge in the current time slot, without knowing the spectrum requests that may come afterward. To solve this problem, we propose considering the opportunity cost of allocating the spectrum to a buyer based on his local interference conditions. We introduce the “interference discount” to markdown a buyer´s bid if he induces a wide range of interference. Furthermore, we take into account the spectrum heterogeneity and design mechanisms that guarantee the economic robustness of the auction. The simulation results show that LOTUS outperforms the existing online auction mechanism, significantly improving buyers´ and sellers´ utility.