Non-identical objects auction for spectrum sharing in TV white spaces — The perspective of service providers as secondary users

The paper considers a new spectrum sharing approach in TV white spaces (TVWS) areas using an auction of non-identical objects taking the bandwidth and power requirements of the secondary users into account. The commodity of the auction is the available frequency band with propagation-signal power limitations. These frequency resources available in TVWS may be distributed among the telecommunication operators and service providers of various types (called players) operating in a given area. The available spectrum-band may be divided into blocks having the same or different sizes and different maximum allowable power. The resource allocation problem in frequency and power domain has been defined as an optimization problem where maximum payoff of the central trading entity (called spectrum broker) is the optimization goal. The problem of the best matching of the players demands, their bids and the auction solution to the available spectrum-holes have been discussed and highlighted. In the auction solution the branch and cut technique, known from integer programming, was applied so the complexity of the optimization algorithm was reduced significantly. Simulations results are also provided.