Truthful Online Reverse Auction with Flexible Preemption for Access Permission Transaction in Macro-Femtocell Networks

In this paper, we study the problem of trading access permissions (ACPs) between a wireless service provider (WSP) and femtocell owners by truthful auctions. We propose a T ruthful O nline R everse A uction (TORA) mechanism that allows the WSP to purchase ACPs at a lower cost in an online manner while preventing femtocell owners from falsely reporting their bids and/or available time. To be specific, we develop an efficient allocation method with flexible preemption so as to enable a multiple-round online allocation and provide bid-truthfulness. In addition, we devise an effective pricing strategy so as to realize time-truthfulness. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the truthful online reverse auction in a hybrid macro-femtocell network. We analytically prove the truthfulness of TORA. Our proof also shows that the truthfulness of TORA does not depend on the knowledge of the bidder behavior. An extensive evaluation study is performed to examine the performance of TORA. Our evaluation results indicate that TORA is able to achieve better bidder satisfaction with a lower cost.