Auction-based Spectrum Sharing

We study auction-based mechanisms for sharing spectrum among a group of users, sub ject to a constraint on the interference temperature at collocated receivers. The users access the channel using spread spectrum signaling and thus generate interference with each other. Each user receives a utility that is a function of the received signal-to-interference plus noise ratio. We propose two auction mechanisms for allocating the received power. The first is an SINR-based auction, which, when combined with logarithmic utilities, leads to a weighted max-min fair SINR allocation. The second is a power-based auction that maximizes the total utility when the bandwidth is large enough. Both auction mechanisms achieve social optimality in a large system limit where bandwidth, power and the number of users are increased in a fixed proportion. We also give sufficient conditions for global convergence of a distributed updating algorithm and discuss the convergence speed.