720 research outputs found
Optimal Mechanism Design with Flexible Consumers and Costly Supply
The problem of designing a profit-maximizing, Bayesian incentive compatible
and individually rational mechanism with flexible consumers and costly
heterogeneous supply is considered. In our setup, each consumer is associated
with a flexibility set that describes the subset of goods the consumer is
equally interested in. Each consumer wants to consume one good from its
flexibility set. The flexibility set of a consumer and the utility it gets from
consuming a good from its flexibility set are its private information. We adopt
the flexibility model of [1] and focus on the case of nested flexibility sets
-- each consumer's flexibility set can be one of k nested sets. Examples of
settings with this inherent nested structure are provided. On the supply side,
we assume that the seller has an initial stock of free supply but it can
purchase more goods for each of the nested sets at fixed exogenous prices. We
characterize the allocation and purchase rules for a profit-maximizing,
Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanism as the
solution to an integer program. The optimal payment function is pinned down by
the optimal allocation rule in the form of an integral equation. We show that
the nestedness of flexibility sets can be exploited to obtain a simple
description of the optimal allocations, purchases and payments in terms of
thresholds that can be computed through a straightforward iterative procedure.Comment: 8 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1607.0252
Game-theoretic Resource Allocation Methods for Device-to-Device (D2D) Communication
Device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks allows
mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to use the licensed spectrum
allocated to cellular services for direct peer-to-peer transmission. D2D
communication can use either one-hop transmission (i.e., in D2D direct
communication) or multi-hop cluster-based transmission (i.e., in D2D local area
networks). The D2D devices can compete or cooperate with each other to reuse
the radio resources in D2D networks. Therefore, resource allocation and access
for D2D communication can be treated as games. The theories behind these games
provide a variety of mathematical tools to effectively model and analyze the
individual or group behaviors of D2D users. In addition, game models can
provide distributed solutions to the resource allocation problems for D2D
communication. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the applications of
game-theoretic models to study the radio resource allocation issues in D2D
communication. The article also outlines several key open research directions.Comment: Accepted. IEEE Wireless Comms Mag. 201
PS-TRUST: Provably Secure Solution for Truthful Double Spectrum Auctions
Truthful spectrum auctions have been extensively studied in recent years.
Truthfulness makes bidders bid their true valuations, simplifying greatly the
analysis of auctions. However, revealing one's true valuation causes severe
privacy disclosure to the auctioneer and other bidders. To make things worse,
previous work on secure spectrum auctions does not provide adequate security.
In this paper, based on TRUST, we propose PS-TRUST, a provably secure solution
for truthful double spectrum auctions. Besides maintaining the properties of
truthfulness and special spectrum reuse of TRUST, PS-TRUST achieves provable
security against semi-honest adversaries in the sense of cryptography.
Specifically, PS-TRUST reveals nothing about the bids to anyone in the auction,
except the auction result. To the best of our knowledge, PS-TRUST is the first
provably secure solution for spectrum auctions. Furthermore, experimental
results show that the computation and communication overhead of PS-TRUST is
modest, and its practical applications are feasible.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Infocom 201
FlexAuc: Serving Dynamic Demands in a Spectrum Trading Market with Flexible Auction
In secondary spectrum trading markets, auctions are widely used by spectrum
holders (SHs) to redistribute their unused channels to secondary wireless
service providers (WSPs). As sellers, the SHs design proper auction schemes to
stimulate more participants and maximize the revenue from the auction. As
buyers, the WSPs determine the bidding strategies in the auction to better
serve their end users.
In this paper, we consider a three-layered spectrum trading market consisting
of the SH, the WSPs and the end users. We jointly study the strategies of the
three parties. The SH determines the auction scheme and spectrum supplies to
optimize its revenue. The WSPs have flexible bidding strategies in terms of
both demands and valuations considering the strategies of the end users. We
design FlexAuc, a novel auction mechanism for this market to enable dynamic
supplies and demands in the auction. We prove theoretically that FlexAuc not
only maximizes the social welfare but also preserves other nice properties such
as truthfulness and computational tractability.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, Preliminary version accepted in INFOCOM 201
Essays on optimal spectrum management for expanding wireless communications
Wireless communications are experiencing an unprecedented expansion. The
increasing mobility of the communication society and the pace of
technological change are growing pressure for more spectrum to support
more users, more uses and more capacity. Thus, spectrum management has
become an extremely important part of wireless communications. A few
regulators are changing their traditional âcommand and controlâ approach.
Nevertheless, many features of optimal spectrum management are still
widely discussed. This work is aimed at contributing to that discussion.
The key insight is that spectrum management can benefit from more
liberal spectrum sharing. This work set out to answer three main research
questions: (i) whether there is a theoretical framework which can be used to
analyze and guide spectrum policy reform, when moving from a traditional
âcommand and controlâ regime to a market-inspired one; (ii) whether it is
possible to design a plausible mechanism which can promote efficient
allocation and assignment of spectrum commons; (iii) whether (and how)
technological developments could enable band sharing methods outside the
traditional management framework and without harmful interference.
The literature on transition economics and policy was used to help
answer the first research question. Evidence from liberalizing countries was
positively analyzed to discuss reforms of spectrum allocation and
assignment methods. Most countries have adopted strategies that gradually
change their spectrum policies and started by using more liberal methods to
assign spectrum. It is also argued that future spectrum reforms might benefit
from insights presented in the transition economics literature.
A translation of a model on cartel quotas under majority rule is
proposed to answer the second research question. The work verifies, firstly,
that an analogous set of properties is satisfied under our assumptions and
that the median-index theorem applies, mutatis mutandis, to our setting.
Thus firms bidding to acquire spectrum commons contribute a minimum
amount of their wealth; the sum of contributions offered is then compared to
other bids for the same spectrum, which is allocated to the highest bidder.
The last research question considers novel ways of spectrum sharing
that might be enabled by technological developments. The work explores
contributions, from various research areas, regarding management of scarce
resources. Those contributions are discussed with respect to shared spectrum
access. It is suggested that spectrum management might benefit from
methods which enable the management of pooled (intermittent) demands for
access, especially methods in line with fair sojourn protocols
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