A Multi-Winner Cognitive Spectrum Auction Framework With Collusion-Resistant Mechanisms

Dynamic spectrum access, enabled by cognitive radio technologies, has become a promising approach to improve efficiency in spectrum utilization, and the spectrum auction is one approach in which unlicensed wireless users lease some unused bands from spectrum license holders. However, spectrum auctions are different from traditional auctions studied by economists, because spectrum resources are interference-limited rather than quantity-limited, and it is possible to award one band to multiple secondary users with negligible mutual interference. Due to its special feature, the multi-winner auction is a new concept posing new challenges in the existing auction mechanisms such as the Vickery-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism.