Spectrum group-buying framework

Auction is a scheme widely used in spectrum redistributions. In spectrum auctions, spectrum holders offer channels for potential buyers to purchase. Buyers are mostly big companies with sufficient budgets. However, there may also be small companies with limited budges interested in spectrum auctions. These small companies can be referred to as secondary users (SUs), which usually do not benefit from the auction. Motivated by the recent group-buying behaviors in the Internet based service, we argue that SUs with small budgets can form a group and take part in the spectrum auction as a whole to increase their winning chances in the auction. These SUs within the same group then evenly share the cost and benefit of the won spectrum. There are no existing auction models that can be applied in this scenario. There are three unique challenges to enable this idea. First, how can a group leader select the winning SUs and charge them fairly and efficiently? Second, how to guarantee truthfulness of users’ bids? Third, how to match the heterogeneous channels to groups when one group would like to buy at most one channel.