A Game-Theoretic Framework to Regulate Freeriding in Inter-Provider Spectrum Sharing

Primary-secondary spectrum sharing is limited in terms of design space, and may not be sufficient to meet the ever-increasing demand of connectivity and high signal quality. The next step to increase spectrum sharing efficiency is to design markets where sharing takes place among primary providers rather than leaving it to the limited case where the primary licensee is idle. Attaining contractual spectrum sharing among primary providers, a.k.a. co-primary or inter-provider sharing, involves additional costs for the users, e.g., roaming fee. Co-primary spectrum sharing without additional charge to the users poses two major challenges: a) regulatory approaches must be introduced to incentivize providers to share spectrum resources, and b) small providers in co-primary spectrum sharing markets may freeride on large providers’ networks as the customers of the small providers may be using the spectrum and infrastructure resources of large providers. Such freeriding opportunities must be minimized to realize the benefits of primary-level sharing. We consider a subsidy-based spectrum sharing (SBSS) market to facilitate co-primary spectrum sharing where providers are explicitly incentivized to share spectrum resources. We focus on minimizing freeriding in SBSS markets and introduce a game-theoretic model to regulate the freeriding. We use the model to explore operational regimes with minimal freeriding

Proof of Sharing in Inter-Operator Spectrum Sharing Markets

Spectrum sharing between cellular operators in the future 5G networks is expected to be a regular phenomena. The accounting of the sharing amount will be an important element for effective inter-operator spectrum sharing. In a recently proposed market where the government subsidizes the operators for sharing their spectrum resources and needs a subsequent verification of which operator shared by how much This verification will help the government to distribute appropriate amount of subsidy to the operators to maximize subscribers’ utility without charging any additional subscription fees. In this paper, we propose two different architectures for measuring spectrum sharing in government subsidized spectrum sharing markets. They are: (1) centralized spectrum manager and (2) cloud-based spectrum manager. In both cases, the spectrum manager records the sharing amount of each participating operator and reports to the government. We call such verification of spectrum sharing as Proof of Sharing (PoS) , based on which the government finally decides how much subsidy money should be given to a operator