Market Based Approaches for Dynamic Spectrum Assignment

Abstract—Much of the technical literature on spectrum sharing has been on developing technologies and systems for non-cooperative) opportunistic use. In this paper, we situate this approach to secondary spectrum use in a broader context, one that includes cooperative approaches to Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA). In this paper, we introduce readers to this broader approach to DSA by contrasting it with non-cooperative sharing (opportunistic use), surveying relevant literature, and suggesting future directions for researc

MUDA: A Truthful Multi-Unit Double-Auction Mechanism

In a seminal paper, McAfee (1992) presented a truthful mechanism for double auctions, attaining asymptotically-optimal gain-from-trade without any prior information on the valuations of the traders. McAfee's mechanism handles single-parametric agents, allowing each seller to sell a single unit and each buyer to buy a single unit. This paper presents a double-auction mechanism that handles multi-parametric agents and allows multiple units per trader, as long as the valuation functions of all traders have decreasing marginal returns. The mechanism is prior-free, ex-post individually-rational, dominant-strategy truthful and strongly-budget-balanced. Its gain-from-trade approaches the optimum when the market size is sufficiently large.Comment: Accepted to the AAAI2018 conferenc

Spectrum Trading: An Abstracted Bibliography

This document contains a bibliographic list of major papers on spectrum trading and their abstracts. The aim of the list is to offer researchers entering this field a fast panorama of the current literature. The list is continually updated on the webpage \url{http://www.disp.uniroma2.it/users/naldi/Ricspt.html}. Omissions and papers suggested for inclusion may be pointed out to the authors through e-mail (\textit{[email protected]})

Quality Sensitive Price Competition in Spectrum Oligopoly:Part 1

We investigate a spectrum oligopoly market where primaries lease their channels to secondaries in lieu of financial remuneration. Transmission quality of a channel evolves randomly. Each primary has to select the price it would quote without knowing the transmission qualities of its competitors' channels. Each secondary buys a channel depending on the price and the transmission quality a channel offers. We formulate the price selection problem as a non co-operative game with primaries as players. In the one-shot game, we show that there exists a unique symmetric Nash Equilibrium(NE) strategy profile and explicitly compute it. Our analysis reveals that under the NE strategy profile a primary prices its channel to render high quality channel more preferable to the secondary; this negates the popular belief that prices ought to be selected to render channels equally preferable to the secondary regardless of their qualities. We show the loss of revenue in the asymptotic limit due to the non co-operation of primaries. In the repeated version of the game, we characterize a subgame perfect NE where a primary can attain a payoff arbitrarily close to the payoff it would obtain when primaries co-operate.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. 41 pages single column format.Conference version is available at arXiv:1305.335

End-user security in mobile telecommunications: Policy perspectives anda research agenda

The recent advances in mobile technologies have brought about increased functionality, however this increased functionality in turn increases the vulnerability of mobile networks, services and users. In such an environment supplying secure mobile services requires a high degree of coordination among a variety of industry players including equipment manufacturers, application developers, operating system developers and service providers. The scale of the challenge can be assessed by merely observing the difficulties faced by administrators of fixed organizational networks in their attempts to maintain virus-free networks in a context where the end users are to some degree under their control. In this light it is easy to imagine that providing secure services to end users in a highly decentralized public mobile network environment will certainly be a challenge. The complexity such services entail raises questions about whether or not service providers will be able to deliver and even more challenging offer security quality of service guarantees. Whether or not secure mobile services will be offered is a function of both supply and demand. While certain measures can be taken to assist the traditional market mechanisms that face challenges when high degrees of coordination are required there may also be a role for public policy. As both a component of critical infrastructures and as a licensed use of the public spectrum with public interest obligations, there may be a basis for public policy mechanisms to be employed to facilitate the supply of such services. In this paper we address these issues by first exploring factors affecting the supply and demand of security technologies and services. This is followed by a review of the policy context and recent developments in the U.S. and Europe. Information from these synopses are then combined with findings from our companion report "The Delft UMTS Testbed and End-user Security Features: to suggest a research agenda that if implemented will answer fundamental questions concerning the future of end-user mobile security

Comparative Analysis of Telecommunications Regulations: Pitfalls and Opportunities

Book Review: Controlling Market Power in Telecommunications: Antitrust vs. Sector-specific Regulation by Damien Geradin and Michel Kerf. In this 2003 publication, the authors comprehensively review and analyze the telecommunications regulatory structure of five nations that have achieved some success in promoting competition in telecommunications markets. The authors engage in this analysis in order to evaluate the use of telecommunications sector-specific regulation versus more general, economywide antitrust regulation to accomplish specific goals related to promoting competition and efficiency in the provision of telecommunications services. This review describes the authors’ analysis and highlights its strengths and limitations. It also offers a few suggestions about the circumstances in which a comparative evaluation of different telecommunications regulatory approaches can be most useful

Socially-optimal online spectrum auctions for secondary wireless communication

Spectrum auctions are efficient mechanisms for licensed users to relinquish their under-utilized spectrum to secondary links for monetary remuneration. Truthfulness and social welfare maximization are two natural goals in such auctions, but cannot be achieved simultaneously with polynomial-time complexity by existing methods, even in a static network with fixed parameters. The challenge escalates in practical systems with QoS requirements and volatile traffic demands for secondary communication. Online, dynamic decisions are required for rate control, channel evaluation/bidding, and packet dropping at each secondary link, as well as for winner determination and pricing at the primary user. This work proposes an online spectrum auction framework with cross-layer decision making and randomized winner determination on the fly. The framework is truthful-inexpectation, and achieves close-to-offline-optimal time-averaged social welfare and individual utilities with polynomial time complexity. A new method is introduced for online channel evaluation in a stochastic setting. Simulation studies further verify the efficacy of the proposed auction in practical scenarios.published_or_final_versio

Trading Wireless Capacity Through Spectrum Virtualization Using LTE-A

Markets for spectrum were first proposed by Ronald Coase as a way to efficiently allocate this resource. It took another forty years for primary markets to be developed (in the form of spectrum auctions) as the mechanism for assigning spectrum licenses to users. It is not a secret that secondary markets would be necessary to fully realize the benefits of economic allocation of spectrum. But this is easier said than done, since spectrum is a complex, multi-dimensional product with relatively few buyers and sellers (at least for commercial mobile services), so liquid secondary markets have not emerged, even though spectrum trading through brokers is commonplace.\ud \ud In this paper, we find that liquidity for spectrum markets can be improved over "naked" spectrum markets when a standardized commodity can be traded that uses the principles of spectrum virtualization. We utilize the Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) of LTE-Advanced as the traded commodity and modify the SPECTRAD model developed in [5] accordingly. Though much remains to be done, we find that this is a promising approach to finally realizing liquid secondary markets in radio spectrum