A Distributed Coalition Game Approach to Femto-Cloud Formation

Abstract

This paper studies distributed formation of femto-clouds in a UMTS LTE network. Femtocell access points (FAPs) are equipped with computational resources. They share their resources with neighboring FAPs and form local clouds with the aim to avoid the remote cloud costs while improving the user quality of experience (QoE) in terms of handling latency. In exchange for sharing their excess resources, FAPs receive monetary incentives proportional to their contribution in performing computational tasks in the femto-cloud. The resource sharing problem is formulated as an optimization problem and a myopic procedure is presented that enables FAPs to collaboratively find its solution in a distributed fashion. In such an optimal femto-cloud structure, the local computational resources of FAPs are maximally exploited, yet the incentive earned by each femto-cloud is divided among the FAPs in a fair fashion. Numerical simulations using NS-3 verify superior QoE of users as well as higher incentives provided to FAP owners as compared with alternative heuristic schemes. Numerical results also show that the grand femto-cloud-the largest collaborative cloud comprising of all FAPs-is not always the optimal structure.