Secondary Spectrum Trading in Spot and Future Markets

Radio electromagnetic spectrum is a scarce resource for wireless communications, and is becoming more congested and precious with the explosive development of wireless services. Cognitive-radio-based dynamic spectrum sharing is one of the key emerging technologies aiming at achieving more efficient spectrum utilization. We propose to investigate how to design an effective allocation and trading mechanism in a dynamic spectrum sharing system. In particular, we focus on short-term secondary spectrum trading in a hybrid spectrum market with both contract buyers and spot market buyers. Our objective is to characterize the optimal policy for the spectrum owners to allocate and sell spectrum dynamically, considering some unique system features: spectrum supply uncertainty, possibility of spectrum spatial reuse, and information asymmetry about users' evaluations. We will also propose low-complexity good heuristics and evaluate the performance of the heuristics compared to the optimal policy.