Simple decentralised market-oriented allocation of sub-channels and power for access-point to terminal multi-carrier communication

Common auction formats are well-understood, relatively simple mechanism which have long been used for allocating an indivisible good to the party that values it the most, for such reasons as speed of allocation, discovery of the true “value” of the object, and fraud prevention. Various auction schemes have been proposed for the allocation of telecommunication resources. The Dutch auction (the price progressively falls until a participant buys the object) has several major virtues: (i) a bid-processing protocol that automatically and simply prioritises the highest bid(s); (ii) possibility of distributive (auctioneer-free) implementation for synchronised terminals; (iii) confirmation of transmitter-receiver pairs at auction time, with smooth continuation if the pair is infeasible; (iv) exceptional signalling economy (the only strictly necessary signal is the winning bid). Below, we utilise this auction for sub-channel allocation in the access-point to terminal link of an orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) network. Concurrently, we utilise a pricing scheme for power allocation. This results in a relatively simple, decentralised scheme for sub-channel and power allocation. Secure software inside each terminal may record transactions for eventual payment collection, or the auction can be interpreted as a prioritised decentralised allocation algorithm, without real money exchange.