An Energy-Efficient Power Allocation Game with Selfish Channel State Reporting in Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper models the conflict between energy-efficient power allocation and selfish CSI reporting in cellular networks, providing a game-theoretic analysis and algorithms to understand and improve energy efficiency under untrustworthy CSI reports.

Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic framework for analyzing selfish CSI reporting and derives a closed-form characterization of energy efficiency in such scenarios.

Findings

Energy-efficient power allocation is more robust in small cells against selfish CSI.

A unique equilibrium exists in the selfish CSI reporting game.

The proposed algorithm performs close to the optimal energy efficiency.

Abstract

With energy-efficient resource allocation, mobile users and base station have different objectives. While the base station strives for an energy-efficient operation of the complete cell, each user aims to maximize its own data rate. To obtain this individual benefit, users may selfishly adjust their Channel State Information (CSI) reports, reducing the cell's energy efficiency. To analyze this conflict of interest, we formalize energy-efficient power allocation as a utility maximization problem and present a simple algorithm that performs close to the optimum. By formulating selfish CSI reporting as a game, we prove the existence of an unique equilibrium and characterize energy efficiency with true and selfish CSI in closed form. Our numerical results show that, surprisingly, energy-efficient power allocation in small cells is more robust against selfish CSI than cells with large transmit powers. This and further design rules show that our paper provides valuable theoretical insight to energy-efficient networks when CSI reports cannot be trusted.