A Reverse Auction Framework for Hybrid Access in Femtocell Network

Abstract

In the two-tier macro-femto heterogeneous network, hybrid access is regarded as the most ideal access control approach to mitigating macro-femto cross-tier interference and enhancing overall network performance. However, the implementation of hybrid access is hindered by a lack of incentive market mechanism to motivate private femtocell owners to offer access permissions to macro users. In this paper, we propose a reverse auction framework for access permission transaction between a macrocell operator and multiple femtocell owners to promote hybrid access. Our goal is to maximize social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness of the auction. Since the coverage of multiple femtocells may overlap, we partition each cell to adjust the granularity of access permission availability. We first propose a Vickery-Clarke-Grove (VCG)-based mechanism, which costs the least among all auction mechanisms that produce maximum social welfare. As the VCG mechanism is too time-consuming, we propose two alternative truthful mechanisms, namely, generalized second-price and suboptimal mechanism. We further extend the auction framework to the scenario where femtocell owners have heterogeneous valuations for access permissions in different locations.