Users First: Service-Oriented Spectrum Auction With a Two-Tier Framework Support

Auction-based secondary spectrum market provides a platform for spectrum holders to share their under-utilized licensed bands with secondary users (SUs) for economic benefits. However, it is challenging for SUs to directly participate due to their limited battery power and capability in computation and communications. To shift complexity away from users, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-round service-oriented combinatorial spectrum auction with two-tier framework support. In Tier I, we introduce several secondary service providers (SSPs) to provide end-users with services by using purchased licensed bands even if the end-users do not have cognitive radio capability. When an SU submits its service request with certain bidding allowance to its SSP, the SSP will help find out which bands within its area are available and bid for the desired ones from the market in Tier II. Specifically, we formulate the bidding process at the SSP as an optimization problem by considering interference management, spectrum uncertainty, flow routing, and budget allowance. In Tier II, considering two possible manners of the seller, we propose two social-welfare-maximizing auction mechanisms accordingly, including the winner determination based on weighted conflict graph and the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-styled price charging mechanism. Extensive simulations have been conducted and the results have demonstrated the higher revenue of the proposed scheme compared with the traditional commodity-oriented single-round truthful schemes.