A game-theoretic approach for bandwidth allocation and pricing in heterogeneous wireless networks

Abstract

In this paper, a distributed two-level Stackelberg game for bandwidth allocation and pricing in heterogeneous wireless networks is proposed. The proposed Stackelberg game consists of two competition game levels, namely, a user level game and a network level game. Networks are the Stackelberg leaders which play the network level game and decide price to maximize the revenue of networks. The multi-mode users are the Stackelberg followers which play the user level game and decide bandwidth allocation to maximize the utility of users. In the user level game, the notion of Match-Degree is introduced to take into account the suitability of networks to various traffics. Then the existence of Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) is verified for this Stackelberg game. To obtain the SE, an iterative algorithm is constructed. Simulation results show that our proposed game not only can significantly increase the utility of users compared with traditional bandwidth allocation schemes, but also can set suitable network price by considering network competition and user behavior.