On Designing Truthful and Optimal Spectrum Assignment Mechanisms for Dynamic Spectrum Access

With the advances of cognitive radio technologies, Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) has received increasing attention. For dynamic spectrum access, a good spectrum assignment algorithm often considers the spectrum demands of different devices and assigns contiguous and variable bandwidth to them. However, if the DSA devices at a location belong to two or more entities, a selfish entity may want to over-claim its devices’ demands, in order to obtain more spectrum for its own devices. Unfortunately none of the existing work has addressed this incentive problem in assigning contiguous and variable bandwidth to DSA devices. To solve this incentive problem, we propose two spectrum assignment mechanisms for DSA, one for single collision domain and one for multiple collision domains. We prove that our two mechanisms are truthful, i.e., they both stimulate each entity to submit the true demands of its own devices. We also prove that the mechanism for single collision domain is optimal in terms of satisfying spectrum demands, and our mechanism for multiple collision domains achieves constantratio approximation of optimal spectrum assignment. Extensive experimental evaluations of our mechanisms show that they have very good performance.