An Auction Approach to Spectrum Management in HetNets

TL;DR

This paper introduces auction-based mechanisms for dynamic spectrum sharing in HetNets, enhancing cell coverage and spectrum efficiency while ensuring truthful resource allocation.

Contribution

It presents a truthful auction framework with performance guarantees and extends it to heterogeneous resource blocks, validated through large-scale simulations.

Findings

Improved cell coverage and spectrum efficiency in simulations

Achieved truthful and efficient spectrum resource allocation

Validated auction mechanisms in real-world large-scale settings

Abstract

The growing demand in mobile Internet access calls for high capacity and energy efficient cellular access with better cell coverage. The in-band relaying solution, proposed in LTE-Advanced, improves coverage without requiring additional spectrum for backhauling, making its deployment more economical and practical. However, in-band relay without careful management incurs low spectrum utilization and reduces the system capacity. We propose auction-based solutions that aim at dynamic spectrum resource sharing, maximizing the utilization of precious spectrum resources. We first present a truthful auction that ensures a theoretical performance guarantee in terms of social welfare. Then in an extended system model that focuses on addressing the heterogeneity of resource blocks, we design a more practical auction mechanism. We implement our proposed auctions under large scale real-world settings. Simulation results verify the efficacy of proposed auctions, showing improvements in both cell coverage and spectrum efficiency.