Promoting femtocell cooperation through incentive for improving data rate of indoor users in underlay heterogeneous network

• Published in: IET communications Vol. 10; no. 17; pp. 2407 - 2415
• Main Authors: Karar, Sandip, Ghosh, Suman, Das Barman, Abhirup
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Institution of Engineering and Technology 24.11.2016
• Subjects: Cellular communication; Cooperation; cross‐tier interference power level; data rate; FAP; femtocell access point; femtocellular radio; game theory; Games; incentive schemes; Incentives; incentive‐based femtocell cooperation game scheme; indoor macrocell users; indoor radio; Interference; macrocell base station; maximum tolerable interference limit; MBS; Networks; Power control; price‐based power control scheme; pricing; radio spectrum management; radiofrequency interference; Stackelberg game; telecommunication control; time sharing access; underlay spectrum sharing; underlay two‐tier heterogeneous network; Utilities; radio spectrum management; macrocell base station; Stackelberg game; telecommunication control; game theory; data rate; incentive schemes; cross-tier interference power level; radiofrequency interference; time sharing access; indoor macrocell users; underlay spectrum sharing; FAP; femtocellular radio; underlay two-tier heterogeneous network; power control; femtocell access point; indoor radio; maximum tolerable interference limit; incentive-based femtocell cooperation game scheme; pricing; price-based power control scheme; MBS
• ISSN: 1751-8628; 1751-8636
• DOI: 10.1049/iet-com.2016.0339

This study proposes an incentive-based femtocell cooperation scheme for indoor macrocell users (MUs) in an underlay two-tier heterogeneous network which helps the indoor MUs to achieve higher data rate through time sharing access from the femtocell. Due to underlay spectrum sharing nature of the femtocell, the network suffers from severe cross-tier interference. To manage this cross-tier interference, a price-based power control scheme is also proposed for the femtocell access point (FAP) whereby the macrocell base station (MBS) controls the transmit power of the FAP by pricing their resulted cross-tier interference power level subject to a maximum tolerable interference limit. A Stackelberg game has been formulated and analysed for joint pricing-based power control and incentive-based cooperation game. Numerical results show the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of achievable rate of indoor users and utilities of both the MBS and the FAP for different locations of the femtocells.