Auction-Based Spectrum Sharing

We study auction mechanisms for sharing spectrum among a group of users, subject to a constraint on the interference temperature at a measurement point. The users access the channel using spread spectrum signaling and so interfere with each other. Each user receives a utility that is a function of the received signal-to-interference plus noise ratio. We propose two auction mechanisms for allocating the received power. The first is an auction in which users are charged for received SINR, which, when combined with logarithmic utilities, leads to a weighted max-min fair SINR allocation. The second is an auction in which users are charged for power, which maximizes the total utility when the bandwidth is large enough and the receivers are co-located. Both auction mechanisms are shown to be socially optimal for a limiting “large system” with co-located receivers, where bandwidth, power and the number of users are increased in fixed proportion. We also formulate an iterative and distributed bid updating algorithm, and specify conditions under which this algorithm converges globally to the Nash equilibrium of the auction.