Spatial SINR Games of Base Station Placement and Mobile Association

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how base station placement and mobile association strategies interact under SINR considerations, revealing complex behaviors and proposing hierarchical equilibrium solutions for optimizing network revenue.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive game-theoretic framework for base station placement and mobile association, including hierarchical equilibrium analysis with interference cancellation.

Findings

Base station displacement can cause boundary reversals in cell regions.

Cells can be disconnected or non-convex, affecting association.

Optimal base station placement depends on interference and frequency band configurations.

Abstract

We study the question of determining locations of base stations that may belong to the same or to competing service providers. We take into account the impact of these decisions on the behavior of intelligent mobile terminals who can connect to the base station that offers the best utility. The signal to interference and noise ratio is used as the quantity that determines the association. We first study the SINR association-game: we determine the cells corresponding to each base stations, i.e., the locations at which mobile terminals prefer to connect to a given base station than to others. We make some surprising observations: (i) displacing a base station a little in one direction may result in a displacement of the boundary of the corresponding cell to the opposite direction; (ii) A cell corresponding to a BS may be the union of disconnected sub-cells. We then study the hierarchical equilibrium in the combined BS location and mobile association problem: we determine where to locate the BSs so as to maximize the revenues obtained at the induced SINR mobile association game. We consider the cases of single frequency band and two frequency bands of operation. Finally, we also consider hierarchical equilibria in two frequency systems with successive interference cancellation.