Secondary Spectrum Trading Market - Auction-based Approach to Spectrum Allocation and Profit Sharing

Recently, dynamic spectrum sharing has been gaining interest as a potential solution to scarcity of available spectrum. We study the problem of designing a secondary spectrum trading market when there are multiple sellers and multiple buyers. First, we introduce a new optimal auction mechanism, called the generalized Branco's mechanism (GBM). The GBM is shown to be both incentive compatible and individually rational, and provides a basic element for the proposed spectrum trading market. Second, we assume that buyers of the spectrum are selfish and model their interaction as a noncooperative game. Using this model, we prove that when the sellers employ the GBM to sell their frequency bands, there exists an incentive for risk neutral sellers to cooperate in order to maximize their expected profits, irrespective of the strategies employed by the buyers. Third, we model the interaction among the sellers as a cooperative game and demonstrate that, for any fixed strategies of the buyers, the core of the cooperative game is nonempty. This indicates that there exists a way for the sellers to share the profits from the sale of the spectrum so that no subset of sellers will find it beneficial to deviate from cooperating with the remaining sellers. Finally, we propose a profit sharing scheme that can achieve any expected profit vector in the nonempty core of the cooperative game, while satisfying two desirable properties.

Speaker Bio: Richard J. La received his MSc and PhD from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California, Berkeley in 1997 and 2000, respectively, and Bachelor of Science from the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Maryland, College Park in 1994. He has been on the faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research in the A. James Clark School of Engineering at University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) since 2001, where he is currently an Associate Professor. Prior to joining UMD, he was a system engineer in Systems Engineering Department at Alcatel USA and a senior engineer in the Performance Evaluation Department at Motorola Inc. His research interests include resource management and performance evaluation of communication systems, network modeling and analysis, and application of game theory in the presence of multiple agents. He is currently on the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) and IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials and (CST). He was the co-chair of ACM MobiHoc Tutorial Sessions (2005) and ACM MobiCom Tutorial Sessions (2008). He was a recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2003.

Presentation Slides: PDF

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