This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Historical static spectrum assignment has led to a critical spectrum shortage. While new prominent wireless technologies starve for spectrum, large chunks of spectrum remain idle most of the time under their current owners. With proper economic incentives, spectrum redistribution based on an open market can eliminate the artificial shortage. This project develops S-TRADE, an auction-driven spectrum trading platform to implement the spectrum marketplace. S-TRADE differs significantly from conventional FCC-style spectrum auctions that target only a few large corporate players and take months or years to conclude. Instead, S-TRADE serves many small players and enables on-the-fly spectrum transactions. In essence, S-TRADE selectively buys idle spectrum pieces from providers and sells them to a large number of buyers matching their individual demands. By effectively multiplexing spectrum supply and demand in time and space, the proposed marketplace also significantly improve spectrum utilization. The design of S-TRADE focuses on achieving spectrum multiplexing/reuse to improve spectrum utilization while guaranteeing economic robustness to encourage player participation and minimize market manipulation. This project focuses on tightly integrating novel algorithms of dynamic spectrum allocation with economic mechanism design. The research outcomes deepen our understanding of the way spectrum should be distributed and the role of economics in distributing it. By integrating economics mechanism design with wireless networking, this project forms an integral part of interdisciplinary training programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
