Spectrum Reservation Contract Design in TV White Space Networks

TL;DR

This paper develops a contract-theoretic framework for spectrum reservation in TV white space networks, optimizing profit under demand uncertainty and risk-sharing schemes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel contract design model for spectrum reservation in TV white space markets considering demand stochasticity and risk allocation.

Findings

Optimal contracts under DB-bearing-risk yield higher profits.

Counter-intuitive result: DB-bearing-risk schemes outperform WSD-bearing-risk schemes.

Framework accommodates demand uncertainty and private information of WSDs.

Abstract

In this paper, we study a broker-based TV white space market, where unlicensed white space devices (WSDs) purchase white space spectrum from TV licensees via a third-party geo-location database (DB), which serves as a spectrum broker, reserving spectrum from TV licensees and then reselling the reserved spectrum to WSDs. We propose a contract-theoretic framework for the database's spectrum reservation under demand stochasticity and information asymmetry. In such a framework, the database offers a set of contract items in the form of reservation amount and the corresponding payment, and each WSD chooses the best contract item based on its private information. We systematically study the optimal reservation contract design (that maximizes the database's expected profit) under two different risk-bearing schemes: DB-bearing-risk and WSD-bearing-risk, depending on who (the database or the WSDs) will bear the risk of over reservation. Counter-intuitively, we show that the optimal contract under DB-bearing-risk leads to a higher profit for the database and a higher total network profit.