Economically-Robust and Secure Auctions for Heterogeneous Secondary Spectrum Market

George Washington University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Over the past few years a number of auction mechanisms have been proposed to improve the channel utilization and benefit both the primary and secondary users in a spectrum market. The major design objective of these auctions focuses on truthfulness (economic-robustness) to prevent market manipulation, i.e., to ensure that buyers and sellers cannot obtain more utility by cheating on bid prices. This objective is typically realized by adapting classic auctions, such as Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG), McAfee, and Myerson's Optimal Mechanism (MOM), for spectrum reuse in homogeneous spectrum markets. There are unaddressed challenges with this approach in a heterogeneous spectrum market, which is characterized by bid diversity in both the spatial and temporal domains, i.e., buyers and sellers can bid different units of the spectrum bands with different channel properties at different locations and in different times. VCG, MOM, and McAfee all lose their truthfulness when bid diversity is considered for heterogeneous spectrum markets. This phenomenon has been largely overlooked by the current research. Additional challenges are that bidders and the auctioneer may have an incentive to collude for profit maximization, and that the disclosure of the bids to the auctioneer may reveal private information of the bidders, resulting in economic espionage and other security concerns. The recent research on secure auctions is sporadic, missing an in-depth study to address the unique challenges of secure auctions in heterogeneous spectrum markets. This project aims to address the challenges mentioned above. The proposed research may foster the development of novel techniques and methodologies toward secure, robust, and efficient spectrum access. The desired properties of an auction in a heterogeneous secondary spectrum market will incent buyers and sellers to use spectrum efficiently. These include: i) truthfulness, collusion-resistance, cheating prevention, and privacy preservation to encourage users to join the market and discourage them from predicting others' bids for market manipulation; ii) high revenues for sellers/buyers and the auctioneer to incent them to participate; and iii) high spectrum utilization. The objective of this project is to design economically-robust and secure auctions that transform current auction models to achieve these properties for heterogeneous secondary spectrum markets. The proposed research can be summarized by the following activities: the design of economically-robust auctions based on virtual valuations for fairness, efficiency, and optimality to prevent market manipulation when addressing the challenges brought on by bid diversity and spectrum reuse; the design of collusion-resistant auctions based on the concept of virtual bidders and novel pricing functions when bidder-bidder and bidder-auctioneer collusions exist; and the design of privacy-preserving auctions based on Homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, and secret-sharing, under the assumption that the auctioneer is not trust-worthy. The expected results of this project include novel auction mechanisms, algorithms, and theories. The research findings will be disseminated through high-quality publications, presentations in focused workshops, and conferences. The project outcomes will provide guidance to industry and may be adopted for market-based short-term spectrum allocations.