An Extensible and Flexible Truthful Auction Framework for Heterogeneous Spectrum Markets

In this paper, we propose an extensible and flexible truthful auction framework that is individually-rational and self-collusion resistant. By properly setting one simple parameter, this framework yields efficient auctions (like Vickery–Clarke–Groves), (sub)optimal auctions (like Myerson’s optimal mechanism), and budget-balanced double auctions; by carefully choosing virtual valuation functions for the bidders, it can produce attribute-aware auctions that take the channel diversity into consideration. The framework adopts a novel procedure that can prevent bidder self-collusion resulted from the bid diversity. In order to reduce the computational complexity of our framework, we propose a greedy auction scheme that possesses all the economic properties of our auction framework. We also prove the performance bound of the greedy algorithm under certain condition. Theoretical analysis and case studies demonstrate the strength of our auction framework in handling various considerations in a practical heterogeneous spectrum market.