An Auction Approach to Spectrum Management in HetNets

The growing demand in mobile Internet access calls for high capacity and energy efficient cellular access with better cell coverage. The in-band relaying solution, proposed in LTE-Advanced, improves coverage without requiring additional spectrum for backhauling, making its deployment more economical and practical. However, in-band relay without careful management incurs low spectrum utilization and reduces the system capacity. We propose auction-based solutions that aim at dynamic spectrum resource sharing, maximizing the utilization of precious spectrum resources. We first present a truthful auction that ensures a theoretical performance guarantee in terms of social welfare. Then in an extended system model that focuses on addressing the heterogeneity of resource blocks, we design a more practical auction mechanism. We implement our proposed auctions under large scale real-world settings. Simulation results verify the efficacy of proposed auctions, showing improvements in both cell coverage and spectrum efficiency.