GAVEL: Strategy-Proof Ascending Bid Auction for Dynamic Licensed Shared Access

Licensed Shared Access (LSA) is a new shared spectrum access model that is gaining traction for unlocking incumbent spectrum to mobile network operators in a form similar to licensed spectrum, thus having the potential to alleviate the spectrum crunch below 6 GHz. Short-term spectrum auctions can pave the way for dynamic LSA in the future and to create incentives for incumbents to voluntarily participate in the LSA model, thereby increase spectrum availability. Different from existing auction schemes that are mostly based on the sealed-bid auction format, we consider an ascending bid format which is theoretically equivalent to a sealed bid format but comes with better behavioral properties. We develop a novel auction mechanism called GAVEL that follows the ascending bid auction format and is well-suited for the dynamic LSA context. GAVEL, besides being strategy-proof, satisfies the three additional desirable properties of supporting heterogeneous spectrum, fine-grained spectrum sharing and bidder privacy protection. In fact, GAVEL is the first mechanism to satisfy all these properties. Through simulation-based evaluations, GAVEL is shown to outperform two recently proposed schemes in terms of revenue, social welfare, number of winners and achieving high spectrum utilization while at the same time performing close to the LP based optimal solution.