Truthful Prioritization Schemes for Spectrum Sharing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a truthful prioritization protocol for shared network routers that incentivizes honest reporting of user values, improves efficiency, and aligns seller incentives through revenue pooling.

Contribution

It presents a novel incentive-compatible prioritization scheme with revenue pooling and identifies demand models ensuring allocation monotonicity.

Findings

Simulation shows improved efficiency over previous methods.

Revenue pooling effectively aligns seller incentives.

Prioritization scheme maintains incentive compatibility.

Abstract

We design a protocol for dynamic prioritization of data on shared routers such as untethered 3G/4G devices. The mechanism prioritizes bandwidth in favor of users with the highest value, and is incentive compatible, so that users can simply report their true values for network access. A revenue pooling mechanism also aligns incentives for sellers, so that they will choose to use prioritization methods that retain the incentive properties on the buy-side. In this way, the design allows for an open architecture. In addition to revenue pooling, the technical contribution is to identify a class of stochastic demand models and a prioritization scheme that provides allocation monotonicity. Simulation results confirm efficiency gains from dynamic prioritization relative to prior methods, as well as the effectiveness of revenue pooling.