The Coalitional Switch off Game of Service Providers

TL;DR

This paper models the cooperative switching off of base stations among service providers using coalitional game theory and stochastic geometry, introducing the Nash-stable core to ensure stable coalition formations while maintaining service quality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coalitional game framework with the Nash-stable core concept for stable cooperation among service providers in green networking.

Findings

Distribution of SIR remains unchanged under cooperation

Nash-stable core is non-empty under certain conditions

Coalitional behavior depends solely on members' preferences

Abstract

This paper studies a significant problem in green networking called switching off base stations in case of cooperating service providers by means of stochastic geometric and coalitional game tools. The coalitional game herein considered is played by service providers who cooperate in switching off base stations. When they cooperate, any mobile is associated to the nearest BS of any service provider. Given a Poisson point process deployment model of nodes over an area and switching off base stations with some probability, it is proved that the distribution of signal to interference plus noise ratio remains unchanged while the transmission power is increased up to preserving the quality of service. The coalitional game behavior of a typical player is called to be \emph{hedonic} if the gain of any player depends solely on the members of the coalition to which the player belongs, thus, the coalitions form as a result of the preferences of the players over their possible coalitions' set. We also introduce a novel concept which is called the Nash-stable core containing those gain allocation methods that result in Nash-stable partitions. By this way, we always guarantee Nash stability. We study the non-emptiness of the Nash-stable core. Assuming the choice of a coalition is performed only by one player in a point of time, we prove that the Nash-stable core is non-empty when a player chooses its coalition in its turn, the player gains zero utility if the chosen coalition is visited before by itself.