中国邮电高校学报(英文) ›› 2014, Vol. 21 ›› Issue (2): 32-39.doi: 10.1016/S1005-8885(14)60283-1

• Networks • 上一篇    下一篇

Stackelberg game for backhaul resource allocation in the two-tier LTE femtocell networks

袁得嵛1,滕颖蕾2,宋梅1,WU Jun-fu   

  1. 1. 北京邮电大学电子工程学院
    2. 北京邮电大学PCN&CAD实验室
  • 收稿日期:2013-11-01 修回日期:2014-03-10 出版日期:2014-04-30 发布日期:2014-04-30
  • 通讯作者: 袁得嵛 E-mail:yuandeyu@gmail.com
  • 基金资助:

    国家自然科学基金;国家重大科技专项;国家科技支撑计划项目

Stackelberg game for backhaul resource allocation in the two-tier LTE femtocell networks

  1. School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
  • Received:2013-11-01 Revised:2014-03-10 Online:2014-04-30 Published:2014-04-30
  • Contact: Deyu Yuan E-mail:yuandeyu@gmail.com
  • Supported by:

    the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61302081), the the National Science and Technology Major Project (2013ZX03003005), and the National Key Technology Support Program (2012BAH41F03).

摘要:

As one promising technology for indoor coverage and service offloading from the conventional cellular networks, femtocells have attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, most of previous work are focused on resource allocation during the access period, and the backhaul involved resource allocation is seriously ignored. The authors studied the backhaul resource allocation in the wireless backhaul based two-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets), in which cross-tier interference control during access period is jointly considered. Assuming that the macrocell base station (MBS) protects itself from interference by pricing the backhaul spectrum allocated to femtocells, a Stackelberg game is formulated to work on the joint utility maximization of the macrocell and femtocells subject to a maximum interference tolerance at the MBS. The closed-form expressions of the optimal strategies are obtained to characterize the Stackelberg equilibriums for the proposed games, and a backhaul spectrum payment selection algorithm with guaranteed convergence is proposed to implement the backhaul resource allocation for femtocell base stations (FBSs). Simulations are presented to demonstrate the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) is obtained by the proposed algorithm and the proposed scheme is effective in backhaul resource allocation and macrocell protection in the spectrum-sharing HetNets.

关键词:

femtocell, Stackelberg game, backhaul resource allocation, interference management

Abstract:

As one promising technology for indoor coverage and service offloading from the conventional cellular networks, femtocells have attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, most of previous work are focused on resource allocation during the access period, and the backhaul involved resource allocation is seriously ignored. The authors studied the backhaul resource allocation in the wireless backhaul based two-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets), in which cross-tier interference control during access period is jointly considered. Assuming that the macrocell base station (MBS) protects itself from interference by pricing the backhaul spectrum allocated to femtocells, a Stackelberg game is formulated to work on the joint utility maximization of the macrocell and femtocells subject to a maximum interference tolerance at the MBS. The closed-form expressions of the optimal strategies are obtained to characterize the Stackelberg equilibriums for the proposed games, and a backhaul spectrum payment selection algorithm with guaranteed convergence is proposed to implement the backhaul resource allocation for femtocell base stations (FBSs). Simulations are presented to demonstrate the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) is obtained by the proposed algorithm and the proposed scheme is effective in backhaul resource allocation and macrocell protection in the spectrum-sharing HetNets.

Key words:

femtocell, Stackelberg game, backhaul resource allocation, interference management