On Designing Truthful Spectrum Auctions for Variable Bandwidths

Dynamic spectrum auctions have been considered a promising approach to effectively re-distribute spectrum resources in the secondary spectrum market. However, the existing spectrum auctions are limited to allocating spectrum in units of channels. Recently software defined radio technologies make exciting progress in operating radios with variable bandwidths. They push the need for designing more flexible spectrum auction frameworks that allow to allocate spectrum with variable bandwidth to the secondary user. In this paper, the authors design truthful spectrum auction frameworks in which secondary users can bid for, and then be actually allocated spectra with variable bandwidths. They first present a truthful framework for auctions of variable-bandwidth spectra in single collision domains, which can achieve system efficiency.