True-MCSA: A Framework for Truthful Double Multi-Channel Spectrum Auctions

Spectrum auctions motivate existing spectrum owners (as sellers) to lease their selected idle channels to new spectrum users (as buyers) who need the spectrum desperately. The most significant requirement is how to make the auctions economic-robust (truthful in particular) while enabling spectrum reuse. Furthermore, in practice, both sellers and buyers would require to trade multiple channels at one time, while guaranteeing their individual profitability. Unfortunately, existing designs can not meet all these requirements simultaneously. We address these requirements by proposing True-MCSA, a framework for truthful double multi-channel spectrum auctions. True-MCSA introduces novel virtual buyer group (VBG) splitting and bidding algorithms, and applies a proper winner determination and pricing mechanism to achieve truthfulness and other economic properties, meanwhile successfully dealing with multi-channel requests from both buyers and sellers and improving spectrum utilization. Our experiments show that the auction efficiency is impacted by the economic factors with efficiency degradations within 30%, under different settings. Furthermore, the experimental results indicate that we can improve the auction efficiency by choosing a proper bidding algorithm and using a positive base bid. True-MCSA makes an important contribution on enabling spectrum reuse to improve auction efficiency in multi-channel cases.