VERACITY: Overlapping Coalition Formation-Based Double Auction for Heterogeneous Demand and Spectrum Reusability

Spectrum auction is one of the most effective solutions to allocate the spectrum resource following the market rules and has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. However, most of the existing studies assume that the spectrum buyers' demands are homogeneous and the interference relationship is fixed without any change with the variation of spectrum. Furthermore, the economical efficiency of auction outcome has not drawn enough attention. That motivates us to design an auction scheme to jointly consider the multi-demand of buyers, heterogeneous spectrum, and economical efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel overlapping coalition formation-based double auction, called VERACITY, to address this problem. The auctioneer groups the conflict free buyers into the same coalition and allows a buyer to join multiple coalitions based on the heterogeneous demand. Dynamic overlapping coalition formation implemented by the auctioneer is to find the approximately optimal coalition structure corresponding to the economical efficiency outcome, i.e., maximizing the social welfare. Furthermore, we prove that VERACITY is individually rational, budget balanced, truthful, and economically efficient. Simulation results are presented to show the convergence and effectiveness of the proposed VERACITY.