Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Auction With Time-Evolving Channel Qualities

Spectrum auction is considered a suitable approach to efficiently allocate spectrum among unlicensed users. In a typical spectrum auction, secondary users (SUs) bid to buy spectrum bands from a primary owner (PO) who acts as the auctioneer. Existing spectrum auctions assume that SUs have static and known values for the channels. However, in many real world settings, the SUs do not know the exact value of channel access at first, but they learn it and adapt it over time. In this paper, we study spectrum auctions in a dynamic setting where SUs can change their valuations based on their experiences with the channel quality. We propose ADAPTIVE, a dynAmic inDex Auction for sPectrum sharing with TIme-evolving ValuEs that maximizes the social welfare of the SUs. ADAPTIVE is based on multi-armed bandit models where for each user an allocation index is independently calculated in polynomial time. Then we generalize ADAPTIVE to Multi-ADAPTIVE that auctions multiple channels at each time. We provide a sufficient condition under which Multi-ADAPTIVE achieves the maximum social welfare. Both ADAPTIVE and Multi-ADAPTIVE have some desired economic properties that are formally proven in the analysis. Also, we provide a numerical performance comparison between our proposed mechanisms and the well known static auctions, namely the Vickrey second price auction and the VCG mechanism.