A Truthful Double Auction Mechanism for Hybrid Spectrums

Auctions have been widely studied as an efficient approach of allocating spectrum among secondary users in recent years. On the other side, a wide range of frequency bands could be available in a spectrum auction considering the current trend of deregulating wireless resources, therefore, channels provided by the primary users may reside in widely separated frequency bands, and due to the difference in propagation profile, would show significant heterogeneity in transmission range, channel error rate, path-loss, etc. Also, we can consider the channels with similar propagation and quality characteristics, for example, channels located in the same frequency band, are homogeneous and can be located in one spectrum type. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a double auction mechanism for both homogeneous and heterogeneous spectrums, called hybrid spectrums. The hybrid auction design has its own challenges, especially it also inherits the challenges related to heterogeneity. We prove that our auction design can not only solve the challenges caused by hybrid spectrums but also preserve three important economic aspects including truthfulness, budget balance and individual rationality. Also, we show that the proposed scheme increases spectrum utilization through spectrum reuse. Also, we offer a novel comprehensive grouping procedure to increase both the channel utilization and the seller satisfaction. Results from extensive simulation studies demonstrate good performance of the proposed algorithms on various auction metrics.