Spectrum Overselling: An Optimal Auction Design Perspective

This paper presents the design of a novel optimal spectrum auction mechanism that enables the Primary User (PU) of a channel to intelligently ‘oversell’ it to a carefully chosen set of unlicensed Secondary Users (SUs) while collecting suitable payments from them. The paper shows that, under inherent uncer-tainties associated with communication processes, our proposed overselling methodology leads to the enhancement of important performance criteria, such as the PU's utility and spectrum utilization, beyond what is permitted by traditional approaches to Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS). Analytical characterization of important properties sustained by our mechanism, such as conditions under which spectrum overselling becomes optimal, have been presented and computationally efficient techniques to implement the proposed methodology have been described. Numerous simulation results have been presented to provide important insights.