Learning gain mechanism to promote the femtocells hybrid access mode

Abstract

Macro network alone cannot support the ever growing demand of the bandwidth hungry applications for the indoor users. Without any assistance, Macro network poses serious concerns for maintaining a good quality of service. Therefore, femtocells provide an attractive solution for meeting capacity requirements of the network. The access control mechanisms of the femtocell plays a crucial role in mitigating cross-tier interference and avoiding additional handover attempts. In this paper, we propose an utility gain framework to permit to the wireless service provider to encourage femto holders located within its coverage to share their resources with macro users. We suppose that femtocells adopt the hybrid access mode. Consequently, each femtocell will reserve a fraction of resource to macro users and will get a gain from the wireless service provider. Our goal is to improve the overall performance and to promote the hybrid access mode. For this, we model the system as a game, we prove the existence of Nash equilibrium and we propose two learning algorithms for the femto holders and the wireless service providers to choose the best strategy allowing them to reach a win-win situation. Numerical results show that both wireless service provider and femto holders benefit from the proposed learning gain mechanism to improve their utilities.