A Reserve Price Auction for Spectrum Sharing with Heterogeneous Channels

Cognitive radio is a novel communication paradigm that can significantly improve spectrum utilization by allowing the cognitive radio users to dynamically utilize the licensed spectrum. To achieve this, studying efficient spectrum allocation mechanisms is imperative. In this paper, we consider a cognitive radio network consisting of a primary spectrum owner (PO), multiple primary users (PU) and multiple secondary users (SU). We propose a reserve price auction mechanism for spectrum sharing in cognitive radio networks where the SUs bid to buy spectrum bands from the PO who acts as the auctioneer, selling idle spectrum bands to make a profit. Unlike most existing auction mechanisms that assume identical channels, we consider a more general and more realistic case where channels have different qualities. Also, SUs are allowed to express their preferences for each channel separately. That is, each SU submits a vector of bids, one for each channel. In addition, reservation prices that are proportional to channel qualities are imposed by the PO. The proposed auction mechanism results in efficient allocation that maximizes SUs' valuations subject to reserve price constraints, and it has desired economic properties that we formally prove in the analysis. Numerical results show performance improvements compared to the case of reserve price auction with identical channels and the case of having no reservation prices.