TORA: A Truthful Online Reverse Auction Scheme for Access Permission Transaction in Macro-Femtocell Networks
Tao Jing, Fan Zhang, Liran Ma, Wei Li, Xuhao Chen And Yan Huo
In this paper, we study the problem of trading access permissions (ACPs) between a wireless service provider (WSP) and femtocell owners in a macro-femtocell hybrid network.We propose a Truthful Online Reverse Auction (TORA) mechanism so as to allow the WSP to purchase ACPs at a lower cost and the femtocell owners to gain higher satisfaction under the truthfulness constraints. To be specific, we develop two efficient allocation methods with flexible preemption and an effective pricing strategy. With the proposed allocation methods and pricing strategy, TORA is able to perform multiple-round online allocations with both time-truthfulness and bid-truthfulness. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the truthful online reverse auction in a hybrid macro-femtocell network. We analytically prove the truthfulness and individual rationality of TORA. Our proof also shows that the truthfulness of TORA does not depend on the knowledge of the bidder behavior. An extensive evaluation study is performed to examine the effectiveness of TORA. Our evaluation results demonstrate that TORA is able to achieve a higher level of bidder satisfaction at a lower WSP cost.
Keywords: Macro-femtocell networks, access permission, online reverse auction, truthfulness, flexible preemption, individual rationality
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