An approximately strategy-proof mechanism for radio spectrum allocation

In wireless networks, a recent trend is to make spectrum access dynamic for the sake of efficient utilization of spectrum. In this case, one promising approach is using auction-based market mechanism where available channels are periodically allocated to users. Two of the key objectives in designing an auction mechanism are strategy-proofness and social welfare maximization. It is hard to design a practical auction achieving both objectives. Prior work either do not consider strategy-proofness or do not guarantee performance ratio. In this paper, we achieve a tradeoff between supporting strong strategy-proofness and maximizing social welfare. We design a polynomial-time spectrum auction mechanism that is approximately strategy-proof which bounds the profit gain of a bidder from a lying bid, and yields an allocation with approximate social welfare. Through simulations, we show that our mechanism improves performance by about 30% in terms of social welfare and spectrum utilization, compared to the state-of-art mechanisms.