Data offloading in heterogeneous cellular networks: Stackelberg game based approach

Abstract

In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), low power smallcells, i.e., Wifi, can be offered an economic incentive in order to offload traffic from high-power macrocell, which is usually overloaded. This becomes important in order to maintain efficient operation of the network and generate benefit of tradeoff between macrocell and smallcells. The benefit to smallcells comes from the economic incentive offered by macrocell and the benefit to macrocell is achieved by reducing the load and saving spectrum. However, two important challenges are faced in this cooperation: 1) How much economic incentive can be offered by macrocell, and 2) How much offloading traffic volumes can be admitted by the smallcells. In this paper, we propose a novel game based approach for data offloading scheme to determine the amount of economic incentive a macrocell should offer to smallcells and to determine how much traffic each smallcell should admit from the macrocell. In our proposal, a two-stage non-cooperative Stackelberg game theory is applied to optimize the strategies of both macrocell and smallcells in order to maximize their utilities.