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

—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 ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Lara B. Deek, Xia Zhou, Kevin C. Almeroth, Haitao Zheng
• Keywords: Auction, Communications, INFOCOM 2011, Spectrum, Topaz