Independent Coordination for Sharing Spectrum and Small Cells

Abstract

Sharing of spectrum and radio access networks (RANs) has been a trend for future mobile networks to economically cope with fast growth in wireless data traffic and services. Although technical and regulatory advancements in dynamic spectrum sharing and wireless network virtualization (WNV) have brought new possibility of sharing, it is unclear how individual mobile network operators (MNOs) may benefit from sharing while in competition. In this regard, we propose a novel framework of independent service sharing coordination (ISSC). The framework sets up an independent platform that respectively collects information from all MNOs for coordination and ensures individual confidentiality at the same time. Each MNO plays both seller and buyer of shared resources and has chicken-egg problems between buy and sell decisions. The framework then adopts a Nash game theoretic approach, where the ISSC platform finds individual MNOs' strategies by iterating over demand estimation, resource allocation, price determination, and subscriber number estimation to find the best response for each MNO. Numerical study demonstrates that ISSC may facilitate all-win sharing of spectrum and RANs among competing MNOs, especially when MNOs have a medium level of demands with different spectrum availability and small cell coverages.