To preempt or not: Tackling bid and time-based cheating in online spectrum auctions

Abstract

Abstract-Online spectrum auctions offer ample flexibility for bidders to request and obtain spectrum on-the-fly. Such flexibility, however, opens up new vulnerabilities to bidder manipulation. Aside from rigging their bids, selfish bidders can falsely report their arrival time to game the system and obtain unfair advantage over others. Such time-based cheating is easy to perform yet produces severe damage to auction performance.We propose Topaz, a truthful online spectrum auction design that distributes spectrum efficiently while discouraging bidders from misreporting their bids or time report. Topaz makes three key contributions. First, Topaz applies a 3D bin packing mechanism to distribute spectrum across time, space and frequency, exploiting spatial and time reuse to improve allocation efficiency. Second, Topaz enforces truthfulness using a novel temporalsmoothed critical value based pricing. Capturing the temporal and spatial dependency among bidders who arrive subsequently, this pricing effectively diminishes gain from bid and/or timecheating. Finally, Topaz offers a "scalable" winner preemption to address the uncertainty of future arrivals at each decision time, which significantly boosts auction revenue. We analytically prove Topaz's truthfulness, which does not require any knowledge of bidder behavior, or an optimal spectrum allocation to enforce truthfulness. Using empirical arrival and bidding models, we perform simulations to demonstrate the efficiency of Topaz. We show that proper winner preemption improves auction revenue by 45-65% at a minimum cost of spectrum utilization.

Near-optimal truthful spectrum auction mechanisms with spatial and temporal reuse in wireless networks

“…Suppose OLP 2 is the optimal solution of LP (2), we apply a standard randomized rounding on it to obtain an integral feasible solution fIP 1 to IP (1). The rounding procedure is presented as follows.…”

“…Second, truthfulness is regarded as one of the most critical properties, however, it's difficult to ensure truthfulness in a spectrum auction mechanism with performance guarantee. Recent years, many mechanisms were proposed to address some of the auction challenges [1][2][3][7][8][9][10][11]. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no truthful spectrum auction mechanism with performance guarantee, in which spectrums can be reused both in spatial and temporal domains.…”

TAHES: Truthful double Auction for Heterogeneous Spectrums

“…Different from our single-round auction model, recently, there are also works considering spectrum auction in an online fashion [15] [17]. In an online spectrum auction, buyers may arrive in different time and they can request the spectrum for a particular duration.…”

Designing Two-Dimensional Spectrum Auctions for Mobile Secondary Users

“…However, their work is less expressive than ours, and more importantly, is still limited to static SUs. Deek et al [23] design Topaz, an online spectrum auction that adopts three-dimensional bids -including channel valuation and the claimed arrival and departure time. Their goal is to discourage bidders from misreporting both their valuations and channel access time window.…”