Truthful Spectrum Auctions With Approximate Social-Welfare or Revenue

In cellular networks, a recent trend in research is to make spectrum access dynamic in the spatial and temporal dimensions for the sake of efficient utilization of spectrum. In one such model, the spectrum is divided into channels and periodically allocated to competing base stations using an auction-based market mechanism. An “efficient” auction mechanism is essential to the success of such a dynamic spectrum access model. A key objective in designing an auction mechanism is “truthfulness.” Combining this objective with an optimization of some social choice function (such as the social-welfare or the generated revenue) is highly desirable. In this paper, we design polynomial-time spectrum auction mechanisms that are truthful and yield an allocation with O(1)-approximate social-welfare or revenue. Our mechanisms generalize to general interference models. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to design polynomial-time truthful spectrum auction mechanisms with a constant-factor approximation of either the expected revenue or the social-welfare. We demonstrate the performance of our designed mechanism through simulations.