Progressive Auction for Dynamic Spectrum Access

Cognitive radio (CR) is a promising paradigm to achieve efficient utilization of the limited spectrum resource by allowing the unlicensed users to access the licensed spectrum, and dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is one of the fundamental functions of CR networks. Market-driven spectrum auction has been recognized as an effective way to achieve DSA. In spectrum auction, the primary spectrum owners (POs) act as auctioneers who are willing to sell idle spectrum bands for additional revenue, and the secondary users (SUs) act as bidders who are willing to buy spectrum bands from POs for their services. However, conventional spectrum auction designs are restricted within the scenario of single auctioneer. In this paper, we study the spectrum auction with multiple auctioneers and multiple bidders, which is more realistic for practical CR networks. We propose MAP, a Multiauctioneer Progressive auction mechanism, in which each auctioneer systematically raises the trading price and each bidder subsequently chooses one auctioneer for bidding. The equilibrium is defined as the state that no auctioneer and bidder would like to change his decision. We show analytically that MAP converges to the equilibrium with maximum spectrum utilization of the whole system. We further analyze the incentive for POs and SUs joining the auction and accepting the auction result. Simulation results show that MAP well converges to the equilibrium, and the spectrum utilization is arbitrary closed to the global optimal solution according to the length of step.