Combinatorial Auction Based on Social Choice in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables smart Things to communicate via the Internet. Things are growing in number, and their need for multiple resources in a complementary manner engenders serious problems in resource allocation. Combinatorial Auctions (CA) are the optimal market mechanism for allocating such indivisible bundles. Since the abundance of bundles in the IoT market makes it impossible to bid on all bundles, Things express their preferences on some (and not all) bundles to make the winner determination amenable. We address the winner determination problem by proposing an allocation mechanism based on social choice methods, which operates on the number of requested resources, the number of bundles, the offered price, and the preferred weight of each bundle. These methods include Borda, Copeland, Average without Misery, Least Misery, and Hare. Finally, we demonstrate the evaluation of these methods in terms of execution time and envy-freeness among the Things.