Traditional regulatory methods for spectrum licensing have been recently identified as one of the causes for the under-utilization of the valuable radio spectrum. Governmental agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking ways to remove stringent regulatory barriers and facilitate broader access to the spectrum resources. The goal is to allow for an improved and ubiquitous sharing of the precious radio spectrum between commercial service providers. In this paper, we propose a novel noncooperative game theoretic approach, to show how to foster more sharing of the radio spectrum via the use of regulatory power. We define a two stage game in which the government regulators move first, followed by the providers. The providers are incentivized by lower spectrum allocation fees from the regulators in return for proof-of-sharing. The providers are offered discounted spectrum bands, potentially at different locations, but will be asked to provide coverage to users that are not subscribed to them so as to maintain their subsidy incentives from the government. In a simplification of the model, analytical expressions for the providers' perfect equilibrium strategies are derived, and we argue for the existence of the government's part of a perfect equilibrium. Our analysis shows that through subsidization, the government can provide small service providers a fair chance to compete with the large providers, thereby avoiding monopolization in the market.
Regulatory practice has been part of the wireless market since its inception as the resource being shared was soon recognized to be very valuable. Governmental agencies establish regulatory policies to increase the efficiency of the spectrum market while preserving an acceptable level of fairness in sharing the precious spectrum. The concept of subsidization is one way to involve the government so as to incentivize various long-term goals in the market being regulated. Typically, subsidy regulations are used for markets serving the larger good'' (i.e., the benefit of the whole society) and involving a significant amount of cost producers cannot bare individually. Transportation @cite_25 , agriculture @cite_18 and telecommunications @cite_24 are examples of such markets where new initiatives require significant infrastructure investments, and hence the government's involvement is justified. However, subsidization is known to have negative effects on the efficiency of the market. Thus, subsidization is preferred if at all possible.
@cite_24 @cite_18 @cite_25
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To accommodate users' ever-increasing traffic in wireless broadband services, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. is considering allocating additional spectrum to the wireless market. There are two major directions: licensed (e.g. 3G) and unlicensed services (e.g. Wi-Fi). On the one hand, 3G service can realize a high spectrum efficiency and provide ubiquitous connection. On the other hand, the Wi-Fi service (often with limited coverage) can provide users with high-speed local connections, but is subject to uncontrollable interferences. Regarding spectrum allocation, prior studies only focused on revenue maximization. However, one of FCC's missions is to better improve all wireless users' utilities. This motivates us to design a spectrum allocation scheme that jointly considers social welfare and revenue. In this paper, we formulate the interactions among the FCC, typical 3G and Wi-Fi operators, and the endusers as a three-stage dynamic game and derive the equilibrium of the entire game. Compared to the benchmark case where the FCC only maximizes its revenue, the consideration of social welfare will encourage the FCC to allocate more spectrum to the service which lacks spectrum to better serve its users. Such consideration for the social welfare, to our delight, brings limited revenue loss for the FCC. Spectrum is a critical yet scarce resource and it has been shown that dynamic spectrum access can significantly improve spectrum utilization. To achieve this, it is important to incentivize the primary license holders to open up their under-utilized spectrum for sharing. In this paper we present a secondary spectrum market where a primary license holder can sell access to its unused or under-used spectrum resources in the form of certain fine-grained spectrum-space-time unit. Secondary wireless service providers can purchase such contracts to deploy new service, enhance their existing service, or deploy ad hoc service to meet flash crowds demand. Within the context of this market, we investigate how to use auction mechanisms to allocate and price spectrum resources so that the primary license holder's revenue is maximized. We begin by classifying a number of alternative auction formats in terms of spectrum demand. We then study a specific auction format where secondary wireless service providers have demands for fixed locations (cells). We propose an optimal auction based on the concept of virtual valuation. Assuming the knowledge of valuation distributions, the optimal auction uses the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to maximize the expected revenue while enforcing truthfulness. To reduce the computational complexity, we further design a truthful suboptimal auction with polynomial time complexity. It uses a monotone allocation and critical value payment to enforce truthfulness. Simulation results show that this suboptimal auction can generate stable expected revenue. To facilitate ubiquitous access for mobile users machines in spectrum efficient way, effective integration of multiple wireless networks possibly belong to different service providers (SPs) is greatly required for future wireless spectrum sharing networks, such as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications. With the aid of cognitive radio or dynamic spectrum access, cooperative spectrum sharing should ensure sufficient incentives to licensed users (LUs) and additional incentives for SPs such that LUs may leverage other SPs' services accordingly as vertical handoff or roaming, which creates another intellectual challenge. We formulate this fundamental problem as a market model by introducing a roaming rate as the incentive for each SP to gain extra revenue when its LUs temporarily leverage other SPs' service. We obtain the equilibrium at which all SPs and all LUs satisfy the amount of the allocated bandwidth and the price simultaneously by using the concept of demand and supply from economics. Two iterative algorithms are proposed to reach the equilibrium for decentralized implementations and their stable conditions are analyzed. Furthermore, the optimal roaming rate obtained by backward induction with the equilibrium maximizes the overall social welfare (i.e., sum of profit of all SPs and payoff of all LUs) by gradient ascent method, such that all SPs as well as all LUs have satisfactory incentives in this cooperative spectrum sharing scheme. Cognitive radio is a promising paradigm to achieve efficient utilization of spectrum resource by allowing the unlicensed users (i.e., secondary users, SUs) to access the licensed spectrum. Market-driven spectrum trading is an efficient way to achieve dynamic spectrum accessing sharing. In this paper, we consider the problem of spectrum trading with single primary spectrum owner (or primary user, PO) selling his idle spectrum to multiple SUs. We model the trading process as a monopoly market, in which the PO acts as monopolist who sets the qualities and prices for the spectrum he sells, and the SUs act as consumers who choose the spectrum with appropriate quality and price for purchasing. We design a monopolist-dominated quality-price contract, which is offered by the PO and contains a set of quality-price combinations each intended for a consumer type. A contract is feasible if it is incentive compatible (IC) and individually rational (IR) for each SU to purchase the spectrum with the quality-price intended for his type. We propose the necessary and sufficient conditions for the contract to be feasible. We further derive the optimal contract, which is feasible and maximizes the utility of the PO, for both discrete-consumer-type model and continuous-consumer-type model. Moreover, we analyze the social surplus, i.e., the aggregate utility of both PO and SUs, and we find that, depending on the distribution of consumer types, the social surplus under the optimal contract may be less than or close to the maximum social surplus.