Performance and incentive of teamwork-based channel allocation in spectrum access networks

Recent years have witnessed the great popularity of dynamic spectrum access networks. Such an approach is adopted between three players: government, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and end-users. ISPs need to purchase spectrum from the government before subletting it to end-users, but currently most researches focus on the subletting process and ignore the purchasing process. In this paper, we try to investigate the game between government and ISPs in spectrum access networks. In this framework, the former aims to optimize user experience yet the later want to maximize their own profits. Such a conflict of interests introduces significant challenges to ensure end-user's performance and thus leads to a severe bottleneck to the spectrum access networks. Inspired by cooperative trends among users, we proposed a novel Channel Allocation model based on Teamwork (CAT). This approach considers both ISP's respective bands and end-user's experience and enables a smart profit sharing algorithm to address the problem. The evaluation results indicate that CAT improves the overall social welfare by about 30% than the Vickrey Clarke Groves (VCG) mechanism and obtains higher stability.