Economically-Robust and Secure Auctions for Heterogeneous Secondary Spectrum Market

在过去几年中，已经提出了一些拍卖机制，以提高信道利用率，并使频谱市场中的主要用户和次要用户都受益。这些拍卖的主要设计目标侧重于真实性（经济稳健性），以防止市场操纵，即确保买方和卖方不能通过欺骗投标价格获得更多效用。这一目标通常是通过调整经典拍卖来实现的，例如Vickrey-Clarke-Groves （VCG）、McAfee和Myerson’s Optimal Mechanism (MOM)，以便在均匀的频谱市场中复用频谱。在异构频谱市场中，该方法存在未解决的挑战，该市场的特点是出价在空间和时间上都存在多样性，即买方和卖方可以在不同地点和不同时间对具有不同信道特性的不同频谱单元进行出价。当考虑异构频谱市场的出价多样性时，VCG、MOM和McAfee都失去了真实性。这一现象在很大程度上被目前的研究所忽视。额外的挑战是，竞标者和拍卖师可能有动机串通以实现利润最大化，并且向拍卖师披露投标可能会泄露竞标者的私人信息，从而导致经济间谍活动和其他安全问题。最近对安全拍卖的研究是零星的，缺乏深入的研究来解决异构频谱市场中安全拍卖的独特挑战。该项目旨在解决上述挑战。提出的研究可能会促进新技术和方法的发展，以实现安全、稳健和高效的频谱接入。在异构二级频谱市场中，期望的拍卖特性将激励买卖双方有效地利用频谱。这些包括：i)真实性，抗合谋性，防止作弊性和隐私保护，以鼓励用户加入市场，并阻止他们预测他人对市场操纵的出价；Ii)卖方/买方和拍卖商的高收入，以激励他们参与；三是频谱利用率高。该项目的目标是设计经济稳健和安全的拍卖，改变当前的拍卖模式，以实现异构二级频谱市场的这些特性。建议的研究可以通过以下活动进行总结：在解决投标多样性和频谱重用带来的挑战时，基于公平、效率和最优性的虚拟估值设计经济稳健的拍卖，以防止市场操纵；基于虚拟竞价概念和新型竞价定价函数的竞价竞价抗合谋拍卖设计在假定拍卖人不可信的情况下，基于同态加密、安全多方计算和秘密共享的保密性拍卖设计。该项目的预期结果包括新的拍卖机制、算法和理论。研究结果将通过高质量的出版物、重点讲习班和会议的报告来传播。项目成果将为行业提供指导，并可用于基于市场的短期频谱分配。

Over the past few years a number of auction mechanisms have been proposed to improve the channel utilization and benefit both the primary and secondary users in a spectrum market. The major design objective of these auctions focuses on truthfulness (economic-robustness) to prevent market manipulation, i.e., to ensure that buyers and sellers cannot obtain more utility by cheating on bid prices. This objective is typically realized by adapting classic auctions, such as Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG), McAfee, and Myerson's Optimal Mechanism (MOM), for spectrum reuse in homogeneous spectrum markets. There are unaddressed challenges with this approach in a heterogeneous spectrum market, which is characterized by bid diversity in both the spatial and temporal domains, i.e., buyers and sellers can bid different units of the spectrum bands with different channel properties at different locations and in different times. VCG, MOM, and McAfee all lose their truthfulness when bid diversity is considered for heterogeneous spectrum markets. This phenomenon has been largely overlooked by the current research. Additional challenges are that bidders and the auctioneer may have an incentive to collude for profit maximization, and that the disclosure of the bids to the auctioneer may reveal private information of the bidders, resulting in economic espionage and other security concerns. The recent research on secure auctions is sporadic, missing an in-depth study to address the unique challenges of secure auctions in heterogeneous spectrum markets. This project aims to address the challenges mentioned above. The proposed research may foster the development of novel techniques and methodologies toward secure, robust, and efficient spectrum access.The desired properties of an auction in a heterogeneous secondary spectrum market will incent buyers and sellers to use spectrum efficiently. These include: i) truthfulness, collusion-resistance, cheating prevention, and privacy preservation to encourage users to join the market and discourage them from predicting others' bids for market manipulation; ii) high revenues for sellers/buyers and the auctioneer to incent them to participate; and iii) high spectrum utilization. The objective of this project is to design economically-robust and secure auctions that transform current auction models to achieve these properties for heterogeneous secondary spectrum markets. The proposed research can be summarized by the following activities: the design of economically-robust auctions based on virtual valuations for fairness, efficiency, and optimality to prevent market manipulation when addressing the challenges brought on by bid diversity and spectrum reuse; the design of collusion-resistant auctions based on the concept of virtual bidders and novel pricing functions when bidder-bidder and bidder-auctioneer collusions exist; and the design of privacy-preserving auctions based on Homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, and secret-sharing, under the assumption that the auctioneer is not trust-worthy. The expected results of this project include novel auction mechanisms, algorithms, and theories. The research findings will be disseminated through high-quality publications, presentations in focused workshops, and conferences. The project outcomes will provide guidance to industry and may be adopted for market-based short-term spectrum allocations.