Spectrum Leasing as an Incentive towards Uplink Macrocell and Femtocell Cooperation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cooperative framework for macrocell and femtocell users using spectrum leasing, employing a coalition game approach to enhance network performance and user rates in wireless networks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel coalition formation game model for macrocell-femtocell cooperation under closed access, optimizing network utility and self-organization.

Findings

Up to 239% increase in macrocell user throughput.

Femtocell user rates improved by up to 21%.

Network self-organizes into stable coalitions.

Abstract

The concept of femtocell access points underlaying existing communication infrastructure has recently emerged as a key technology that can significantly improve the coverage and performance of next-generation wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a framework for macrocell-femtocell cooperation under a closed access policy, in which a femtocell user may act as a relay for macrocell users. In return, each cooperative macrocell user grants the femtocell user a fraction of its superframe. We formulate a coalitional game with macrocell and femtocell users being the players, which can take individual and distributed decisions on whether to cooperate or not, while maximizing a utility function that captures the cooperative gains, in terms of throughput and delay.We show that the network can selforganize into a partition composed of disjoint coalitions which constitutes the recursive core of the game representing a key solution concept for coalition formation games in partition form. Simulation results show that the proposed coalition formation algorithm yields significant gains in terms of average rate per macrocell user, reaching up to 239%, relative to the non-cooperative case. Moreover, the proposed approach shows an improvement in terms of femtocell users' rate of up to 21% when compared to the traditional closed access policy.