Cooperation Incentives and Downlink Radio Resource Allocation for Green Communications in a Heterogeneous Wireless Environment

Abstract

In a heterogeneous wireless medium, base stations (BSs) with overlapped coverage can cooperate for power saving through efficient radio resource allocation to mobile terminals (MTs) with multihoming capabilities. Specifically, an MT can aggregate the offered radio resources from different BSs to satisfy its required service quality at reduced BS power consumption. Unlike the existing works, we investigate green communications in a multioperator system where BSs are operated by different service providers. In such a scenario, cooperation among different networks is favored only if it results in a win–win situation among the service providers. Toward this end, we propose a decentralized downlink radio resource allocation strategy that guarantees mutual benefit (power saving) among different service providers. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy offers incentives to different service providers to cooperate for power saving, as opposed to the existing mechanisms that assume the networks are willing to cooperate unconditionally and saves more power, as compared with the noncooperative mechanisms.