A strategy-proof spectrum auction for balancing revenue and fairness

It is urgent to solve the contradiction between limited spectrum resources and the increasing demand from the evergrowing wireless networks. However, the existing static spectrum management leads to the underutilization of critical spectrum resources. Auctions, as one of the main methods of dynamic spectrum allocation, has been proven to be a powerful approach to mitigate the problem. There are several unique challenges to conduct a practical spectrum auction. First, primary users need financial motivations to share their spectrum. Second, recent studies on such topic mostly neglect the repeatability of such auctions, resulting in starvation which reduces all users' longterm interests. Therefore, it's reasonable to maintain a trade-off between revenue and fairness. Strategy-proof auctions encourage secondary users to bid truthfully, which offers lots of advantages to both primary users and secondary users. In this paper, we design a spectrum auction, which achieves strategy-proofness, and has a trade-off between revenue maximization and fairness. Simulation results show that our algorithm can generate competitive revenue, while taking the fairness into account to avoid starvation.