Strategyproof auctions for balancing social welfare and fairness in secondary spectrum markets

Abstract—Secondary spectrum access is emerging as a promising approach for mitigating the spectrum scarcity in wireless networks. Coordinated spectrum access for secondary users can be achieved using periodic spectrum auctions. Recent studies on such auction design mostly neglect the repeating nature of such auctions, and focus on greedily maximizing social welfare. Such auctions can cause subsets of users to experience starvation in the long run, reducing their incentive to continue participating in the auction. It is desirable to increase the diversity of users allocated spectrum in each auction round, so that a trade-off between social welfare and fairness is maintained. We study truthful mechanisms towards this objective, for both local and global fairness criteria. For local fairness, we introduce randomization into the auction design, such that each user is guaranteed a minimum probability of being assigned spectrum. Computing an optimal, interference-free spectrum allocation i...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Ajay Gopinathan, Zongpeng Li, Chuan Wu
• Keywords: Communications, Fairness Criterion, INFOCOM 2011, Linear Programming Techniques, Spectrum Scarcity