An Auction Approach to Spectrum Leasing in Two-Tier Femtocell Networks

Abstract

In recent years, wireless industries have adopted femtocell networks for enhancing indoor coverage and quality of service. In the femtocell networks, it is an important issue to achieve much more revenue with the limited spectrum resource. The macrocell base station (MBS) owns all available resource, and femtocell base stations (FBSs) own no spectrum and want to rent spectrum from the MBS. This paper proposes an auction-based pricing scheme to investigate the spectrum leasing problem in the scenario with a central macrocell and multiple femtocells. We model the spectrum leasing procedure between MBS and FBSs as an auction that aims at motivating the MBS to lease its spectrum resource. All FBSs act as the bidders and the monopolist MBS acts as the auctioneer. In this auction, FBSs submit their bids to rent spectrum resources so that they can make profit by selling them to their subscribers, while the MBS determines the spectrum leasing amount and chooses the winner FBSs. In this paper, we focus on spectrum pricing scheme and revenue maximization of the MBS. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides effective motivation for the MBS to lease spectrum to FBSs and both the MBS and FBSs can benefit from spectrum leasing.