Joint Incentive and Resource Allocation Design for User Provided Network Under 5G Integrated Access and Backhaul Networks

Abstract

User provided network (UPN) allows a user with high channel quality to share the network access for users with poor channel quality. As a result, both the quality of experience and efficiency of network resource can be improved by UPN. However, the success of UPN relies heavily on the willingness of users to participate in sharing, so the design of incentive mechanisms is critical for UPN. In this paper, the UPN formed by D2D links under 5G integrated access and backhaul (IAB) networks is considered. In IAB networks, both access and backhaul links use wireless transmissions and dynamically share all the spectrum resources. Thus, the resource allocation for all the links also has a great impact on the UPN efficiency. To this end, a novel joint incentive and resource allocation design is explored. More specifically, considering the fairness between users, a Nash bargaining problem as a cooperative game is formulated by considering the user utility, the sensitivity of battery energy, the incentive compensation, and the limitation of network resources. To achieve the optimal Nash bargaining solution, a centralized algorithm is first designed, in which all the user information is collected by the operator for conducting centralized optimization. Thus, the centralized algorithm leads to a privacy problem. To this end, a distributed algorithm is developed to decompose the primal problem into subproblems for the operator and each user. By passing intermediate parameters between users and iterative execution of subproblems, the solution of the distributed algorithm is proved to converge to the optimal solution of the centralized algorithm. Extensive numerical results have been conducted to show that our design can effectively improve both the user experience and network throughput, i.e., operator's revenue.