Spectrum Sharing Auction platform for Short-term licensed shared access

Abstract

Licensed shared access (LSA) is an emergent regulatory approach that allows spectrum licensed for shared secondary use among multiple entities while maintaining a level of quality of service. There have been bands planned and pilot trials conducted for LSA such as 2.3–2.4 GHz in European Union. Market mechanism and platform to realize LSA among regulator, primary license holders and secondary LSA licensees remain outstanding challenges. This paper designs and implements a prototype of online Auction platform for LSA-based Short-term Spectrum Sharing (ALS3) by exploiting two economically-robust and computation time efficient single-round auction mechanisms, one unilateral and one bilateral, that Zhan et al. proposed. Core to system implementation of ALS3 is a solution stack of Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP (WAMP), which runs auction algorithms in the background, facilitates market player communications and brokerage database management, and provides user friendly interfaces. Performance tests over scenarios of realistic dimensions show that ALS3 completes one single-round auction within a few minutes after bid submissions. This prototype platform not only has the potential for applications to future LSA markets but may also serve as baseline environment for LSA trading behavior experiments.