Private and Truthful Aggregative Game for Large-Scale Spectrum Sharing

Thanks to the rapid development of information technology, the size of a wireless network is becoming larger and larger, which makes spectrum resources more precious than ever before. To improve the efficiency of spectrum utilization, game theory has been applied to study efficient spectrum sharing for a long time. However, the scale of wireless networks in existing studies is relatively small. In this paper, we introduce a novel game called aggregative game and use it to model spectrum sharing in large-scale, heterogeneous, and dynamic networks. Meanwhile, the massive usage of the spectrum leads to easier divulgence of privacy of spectrum users, which calls for privacy and truthfulness guarantees. In a large decentralized scenario, each user has no priori about other users’ channel access decisions, which forms an incomplete information game. A “weak mediator,” e.g., the base station or licensed spectrum regulator, is introduced and it turns the incomplete spectrum sharing game into a complete one. This is essential in reaching a Nash equilibrium (NE). By utilizing past channel access experience, we propose an online learning algorithm to improve the utility of each user. We show that the learning algorithm achieves an NE over time and provides no regret guarantee for each user. Specifically, our mechanism admits an approximate
ex-post
NE, and is joint differentially private and incentive-compatible. Efficiency of the approximate NE is evaluated, and innovative scaling law results are disclosed. We also provide simulation results to verify our analysis.