Economically-Robust and Secure Auctions for Heterogeneous Secondary Spectrum Market

在过去的几年里，人们提出了一些拍卖机制来提高频谱市场中的信道利用率，并使主用户和次用户都受益。这些拍卖的主要设计目标集中在真实性(经济稳健性)上，以防止市场操纵，即确保买卖双方不能通过在出价上作弊来获得更多的效用。这一目标通常是通过采用经典拍卖来实现的，例如Vickrey-Clarke-Groves(VCG)、McAfee和Myerson的最佳机制(MOM)，以便在同质频谱市场中重复使用频谱。这种方法在异质频谱市场中存在尚未解决的挑战，该市场的特点是在空间和时间域上都具有投标多样性，即买卖双方可以在不同的位置和不同的时间对具有不同信道特性的不同频谱单元进行投标。当考虑到不同频谱市场的投标多样性时，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忽视了。其他挑战是，投标人和拍卖人可能有串通利润最大化的动机，向拍卖人披露出价可能会泄露投标人的私人信息，导致经济间谍和其他安全担忧。最近关于安全拍卖的研究是零星的，缺少一项深入的研究来解决不同频谱市场中安全拍卖的独特挑战。该项目旨在应对上述挑战。这项研究可能会促进新的技术和方法的发展，以实现安全、稳健和高效的频谱接入。在异质二级频谱市场中拍卖所需的特性将激励买卖双方有效地使用频谱。这些措施包括：i)真实、防止串通、防止作弊和保护隐私，以鼓励用户加入市场，并阻止他们预测其他人对操纵市场的出价；ii)为卖家/买家和拍卖商带来高收入，以鼓励他们参与；以及iii)高频谱利用率。该项目的目标是设计经济可靠和安全的拍卖，以改变现有的拍卖模式，以实现不同类型二级频谱市场的这些特性。所提出的研究可以总结为以下活动：基于公平、效率和最优性的基于虚拟估值的经济稳健拍卖的设计，以防止在应对竞价多样性和频谱重用带来的挑战时的市场操纵；基于虚拟投标人的概念和当存在投标人-投标人和投标人-拍卖人合谋时的抗合谋拍卖设计；以及基于同态加密、安全多方计算和秘密共享的基于同态加密、安全多方计算和秘密共享的隐私保护拍卖设计。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、在重点研讨会和会议上的陈述进行传播。项目成果将为行业提供指导，并可能被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.