126 research outputs found
Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges
In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging
technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing
online activities over public networks. As an essential market process,
auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to
their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features
between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research
and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can
provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the
auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design
incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These
opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in
both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of
existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive
state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing
solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some
application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open
research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction
models
Distributed optimisation techniques for wireless networks
Alongside the ever increasing traffic demand, the fifth generation (5G) cellular network architecture is being proposed to provide better quality of service, increased data rate, decreased latency, and increased capacity. Without any doubt, the 5G cellular network will comprise of ultra-dense networks and multiple input multiple output technologies. This will make the current centralised solutions impractical due to increased complexity. Moreover, the amount of coordination information that needs to be transported over the backhaul links will be increased. Distributed or decentralised solutions are promising to provide better alternatives.
This thesis proposes new distributed algorithms for wireless networks which aim to reduce the amount of system overheads in the backhaul links and the system complexity. The analysis of conflicts amongst transmitters, and resource allocation are conducted via the use of game theory, convex optimisation, and auction theory.
Firstly, game-theoretic model is used to analyse a mixed quality of service (QoS) strategic non-cooperative game (SNG), for a two-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channel. The players are considered to have different objectives. Following this, the mixed QoS SNG is extended to a multicell multiuser network in terms of signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) requirement. In the multicell multiuser setting, each transmitter is assumed to be serving real time users (RTUs) and non-real time users (NRTUs), simultaneously. A novel mixed QoS SNG algorithm is proposed, with its operating point identified as the Nash equilibrium-mixed QoS (NE-mixed QoS). Nash, Kalai-Smorodinsky, and Egalitarian bargain solutions are then proposed to improve the performance of the NE-mixed QoS. The performance of the bargain solutions are observed to be comparable to the centralised solutions.
Secondly, user offloading and user association problems are addressed for small cells using auction theory. The main base station wishes to offload some of its users to privately owned small cell access points. A novel bid-wait-auction (BWA) algorithm, which allows single-item bidding at each auction round, is designed to decompose the combinatorial mathematical nature of the problem. An analysis on the existence and uniqueness of the dominant strategy equilibrium is conducted. The BWA is then used to form the forward BWA (FBWA) and the backward BWA (BBWA). It is observed that the BBWA allows more users to be admitted as compared to the FBWA.
Finally, simultaneous multiple-round ascending auction (SMRA), altered SMRA (ASMRA), sequential combinatorial auction with item bidding (SCAIB), and repetitive combinatorial auction with item bidding (RCAIB) algorithms are proposed to perform user offloading and user association for small cells. These algorithms are able to allow bundle bidding. It is then proven that, truthful bidding is individually rational and leads to Walrasian equilibrium. The performance of the proposed auction based algorithms is evaluated. It is observed that the proposed algorithms match the performance of the centralised solutions when the guest users have low target rates. The SCAIB algorithm is shown to be the most preferred as it provides high admission rate and competitive revenue to the bidders
Enabling Privacy-preserving Auctions in Big Data
We study how to enable auctions in the big data context to solve many
upcoming data-based decision problems in the near future. We consider the
characteristics of the big data including, but not limited to, velocity,
volume, variety, and veracity, and we believe any auction mechanism design in
the future should take the following factors into consideration: 1) generality
(variety); 2) efficiency and scalability (velocity and volume); 3) truthfulness
and verifiability (veracity). In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving
construction for auction mechanism design in the big data, which prevents
adversaries from learning unnecessary information except those implied in the
valid output of the auction. More specifically, we considered one of the most
general form of the auction (to deal with the variety), and greatly improved
the the efficiency and scalability by approximating the NP-hard problems and
avoiding the design based on garbled circuits (to deal with velocity and
volume), and finally prevented stakeholders from lying to each other for their
own benefit (to deal with the veracity). We achieve these by introducing a
novel privacy-preserving winner determination algorithm and a novel payment
mechanism. Additionally, we further employ a blind signature scheme as a
building block to let bidders verify the authenticity of their payment reported
by the auctioneer. The comparison with peer work shows that we improve the
asymptotic performance of peer works' overhead from the exponential growth to a
linear growth and from linear growth to a logarithmic growth, which greatly
improves the scalability
Efficient Three-stage Auction Schemes for Cloudlets Deployment in Wireless Access Network
Cloudlet deployment and resource allocation for mobile users (MUs) have been
extensively studied in existing works for computation resource scarcity.
However, most of them failed to jointly consider the two techniques together,
and the selfishness of cloudlet and access point (AP) are ignored. Inspired by
the group-buying mechanism, this paper proposes three-stage auction schemes by
combining cloudlet placement and resource assignment, to improve the social
welfare subject to the economic properties. We first divide all MUs into some
small groups according to the associated APs. Then the MUs in same group can
trade with cloudlets in a group-buying way through the APs. Finally, the MUs
pay for the cloudlets if they are the winners in the auction scheme. We prove
that our auction schemes can work in polynomial time. We also provide the
proofs for economic properties in theory. For the purpose of performance
comparison, we compare the proposed schemes with HAF, which is a centralized
cloudlet placement scheme without auction. Numerical results confirm the
correctness and efficiency of the proposed schemes.Comment: 22 pages,12 figures, Accepted by Wireless Network
Network capacity enhancement in HetNets using incentivized offloading mechanism
This work investigates distributed algorithms for joint power allocation and user association in heterogeneous networks. We propose auction-based algorithms for offloading macrocell users (MUs) from the macrocell base station (MBS) to privately owned small-cell access points (SCAs). We first propose a simultaneous multiple-round ascending auction (SMRA) for allocating MUs to SCAs. Taking into account the overheads incurred by SCAs during valuation in the SMRA, further improvements are proposed using techniques known as sub-optimal altered SMRA (ASMRA), the combinatorial auction with item bidding (CAIB) and its variations; the sequential CAIB (SCAIB) and the repetitive CAIB (RCAIB). The proof
for existence of the Walrasian equilibrium (WE) is demonstrated through establishing that the valuation function used by the SCAs is a gross substitute. Finally, we show that truthful bidding is individual rational for all of our proposed algorithms
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