Wireless Network Virtualization as A Sequential Auction Game

We propose a virtualization framework to separate the network operator (NO) who focuses on wireless resource management and service providers (SP) who target distinct objectives with different constraints. Within the proposed framework, we model the interactions among SPs and NO as a stochastic game, each stage of which is played by SPs (on behalf of the end users) and is regulated by the NO through the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism. Due to the strong coupling between the future decisions of SPs and lack of global information at each SP, the stochastic game is notoriously hard. Instead, we introduce conjectural prices to represent the future congestion levels the end users potentially will experience, via which the future interactions between SPs are decoupled. Then, the policy to play the dynamic rate allocation game becomes selecting the conjectural prices and announcing a strategic value function (i.e., the preference on the rate) at each time. We prove that there exists one Nash equilibrium in the conjectural prices and, given the conjectural prices, the SPs have to truthfully reveal their own value function. We further prove that this Nash equilibrium results in efficient rate allocation in our virtualized wireless network. In other words, there are enough incentives for NO to advertise such a conjectural price and SPs to follow this advice.