Enabling Radio-as-a-Service with Truthful Auction Mechanisms

We envision that in the near future, just as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, radios, and radio resources in a wireless network can also be provisioned as a service to mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), which we refer to as Radio-as-a-Service (RaaS). A major obstacle for wide adoption of RaaS is the lack of incentives and fairness for allocating radio resources among MVNOs. In this paper, we present a novel auction-based model to enable fair pricing and fair resource allocation according to real-time needs of MVNOs for RaaS. Based on the proposed model, we study the auction mechanism design with the objective of maximizing social welfare. First, we present an integer linear programming and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-based auction mechanism for obtaining optimal social welfare. To reduce time complexity, we present a polynomial-time greedy mechanism for the RaaS auction. Both methods have been formally shown to be truthful and individually rational. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed greedy auction mechanism can quickly produce close-to-optimal solutions. Furthermore, to prevent winning bidders from making 0 payment, we introduce reserve prices, and present auction mechanisms with reserve prices, which are shown to be truthful and individually rational too.