Game Theoretic Analysis of Green Spectrum and Infrastructure Leasing on TV Bands

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a green spectrum and infrastructure leasing framework for sharing unused TV spectrum, in which the ownership of the network infrastructure and spectrum are decoupled, and each can be leased as a service on demand. An incumbent TV spectrum owner (TSO) can lease a share of the infrastructure from a network infrastructure owner (NIO) with a pay-per-use model, to provide new services to its end users. On the other hand, a TSO can rent a portion of its unused spectrum to the NIO for revenue such that the NIO can obtain access to the spectrum to serve its customers. This proposed framework achieves green communications through both resource sharing and energy saving. Our paper aims to analyze the interplay between TSO and NIO, and create a win–win situation to provide sufficient incentives for them to cooperate on this green communications. A multistage Stackelberg game is formulated, where TSO and NIO sequentially determine the total bandwidth supply for sharing, the infrastructure leasing price, the amount of infrastructure to lease, the spectrum leasing price, and the amount of spectrum to lease to maximize their utilities. The best strategies that will be taken by the TSO and NIO under various deployment scenarios are analyzed. Evaluation results show that the proposed green spectrum and infrastructure leasing framework is a promising scheme under which both TSO and NIO can benefit, and their utilities can be maximized in terms of user data throughput and revenue/payment, which provides sufficient incentives for them to cooperate.