Dynamic spectrum access is a new paradigm of secondary spectrum utilization
and sharing. It allows unlicensed secondary users (SUs) to exploit
opportunistically the under-utilized licensed spectrum. Market mechanism is a
widely-used promising means to regulate the consuming behaviours of users and,
hence, achieves the efficient allocation and consumption of limited resources.
In this paper, we propose and study a hybrid secondary spectrum market
consisting of both the futures market and the spot market, in which SUs
(buyers) purchase under-utilized licensed spectrum from a spectrum regulator,
either through predefined contracts via the futures market, or through spot
transactions via the spot market. We focus on the optimal spectrum allocation
among SUs in an exogenous hybrid market that maximizes the secondary spectrum
utilization efficiency. The problem is challenging due to the stochasticity and
asymmetry of network information. To solve this problem, we first derive an
off-line optimal allocation policy that maximizes the ex-ante expected spectrum
utilization efficiency based on the stochastic distribution of network
information. We then propose an on-line VickreyCClarkeCGroves (VCG) auction
that determines the real-time allocation and pricing of every spectrum based on
the realized network information and the pre-derived off-line policy. We
further show that with the spatial frequency reuse, the proposed VCG auction is
NP-hard; hence, it is not suitable for on-line implementation, especially in a
large-scale market. To this end, we propose a heuristics approach based on an
on-line VCG-like mechanism with polynomial-time complexity, and further
characterize the corresponding performance loss bound analytically. We finally
provide extensive numerical results to evaluate the performance of the proposed
solutions.Comment: This manuscript is the complete technical report for the journal
version published in INFORMS Operations Researc