Person:

Kash, I

Wireless spectrum is a valuable and scarce resource that currently suffers from under-use because of the dominant paradigm of exclusive-use licensing. We propose the SATYA auction (Sanskrit for truth), which allows short-term leases to be auctioned and supports diverse bidder types, including those willing to share access and those who require exclusive-use access. Thus, unlike unlicensed spectrum such as Wi-Fi, which can be shared by any device, and exclusive-use licensed spectrum, where sharing is precluded, SATYA improves efficiency through supporting sharing alongside quality-of-service protections. The auction is designed to be scalable, and also strategy proof, so that simple bidding protocols are optimal. The primary challenge is to handle the externalities created by allocating shared-use alongside exclusive-use bidders. Using realistic Longley-Rice based propagation modeling and data from the FCC’s CDBS database, we conduct extensive simulations that demonstrate SATYA’s ability to handle heterogeneous bidders involving different transmit powers and spectrum needs.

Wireless spectrum is a scare resource, but in practice much of it is under-used by current owners. To enable better use of this spectrum, we propose an auction approach to dynamically allocate the spectrum in a secondary market. Unlike previous auction approaches, we seek to take advantage of the ability to share spectrum among some bidders while respecting the needs of others for exclusive use. Thus, unlike unlicensed spectrum (e.g. Wi-Fi), which can be shared by any device, and exclusive-use licensed spectrum, where sharing is precluded, we enable efficient allocation by supporting sharing alongside quality-of-service protections. We present SATYA (Sanskrit for “truth”), a strategyproof and scalable spectrum auction algorithm whose primary contribution is in the allocation of a right to contend for spectrum to both sharers and exclusive-use bidders. Achieving strategyproofness in our setting requires appropriate handling of the externalities created by sharing. We demonstrate SATYA’s ability to handle heterogeneous agent types involving different transmit powers and spectrum needs through extensive simulations.