Mechanism Design for Wireless Networks: from Economic Models to Technical Solutions

Today's wireless communication networks are highly complex. They carry heterogeneous traffic in diverse environments, and usually involve multiple self-interested entities. There are often conflicting goals among the regulators, commercial operators and end users. To better build, understand, maintain, optimize, and upgrade such large distributed networks, it is important to design economic mechanisms as well as technologies. Past history has shown that sound technologies based on pure engineering considerations can fail to get adopted. Now the wireless networks are also at the cutting edge of their evolution, where dynamic spectrum accessing and cognitive radio technologies bring economics and incentive issues to the fore. There are opportunities to build economic incentives into the network architecture and protocols under development, and avoid the many problems that have arisen on the previous network system design due to their lack thereof.;We discuss five typical scenarios in wireless network scenarios. The first one is about the cooperation scheme design for wireless service providers. We show that opportunities that they can cooperate widely exist and through cooperation they address the shortage of spectrum resource easily and economical efficiently. Then we study the deployment and management problems in Macro-femto heterogeneous networks from business models and technical solutions aspects. We classify the models into three categories: joint-deployment WSP-deployment, and user-deployment. Their unique characteristics, corresponding challenges and potential solutions are further explored to provide a deeper insight from the systematic point of view. We also present a scheme on the WSPs revenue maximization under the WSP-deployment case. In the third work, we propose a cooperation framework for a mobile operator and a fixed-line operator. Through combining their fixed-line infrastructures and spectrum resources, femtocells can be deployed and managed. We consider both the technical and economical factors. A unique closed-form equilibrium is derived by Nash bargaining model, which is fair and efficient and thus amenable to the operators. In the fourth work, we propose a three-stage auction-based framework for spectrum group-buying. As an individual user may not be from the same secondary networks with others and he can not afford a whole channel by his own, it is feasible to group them together and bid for the same channel. The framework takes into account users' limited budgets and different evaluations of channels as well as fairness and efficiency. In the last work, we jointly study the spectrum holder's strategy in auction and the WSPs' strategies in service provisions. We point out the relationship between their optimal strategies. To meet the WSP's flexible requirements, we design Flexauc, a novel auction mechanism to enables WSPs to bid for a dynamic number of channels. We prove theoretically that Flexauc not only maximizes the social welfare but also preserves other nice properties: truthfulness and computational tractability.