Nucleolus-Based Profit Sharing for Wireless Small Cells in Content Centric Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the resource management in a heterogeneous small cell network implemented in a Content Centric Network (CCN), where a hierarchical innetwork caching framework is formed with small cell base stations (SBSs) and macro base station (MBS) taking the role of the CCN router. In the hierarchical network structure, SBSs in the same hot spot cooperate and serve as the first hop routers, handling the Interest packets issued by the users. While the MBS works as the next hop router when a cache miss occurs at the small cell layer. Taken into consideration the feature of content request and content retrieving in CCN, we establish the link between SBSs and users on the request level rather than adopt the fixed connection regime. This means different SBSs may come to serve the same user in terms the content request it generates. In this context, we model a cooperative game among SBSs with transferable utility, in which the SBSs in a hot spot collaborate to maximize their overall revenue by selecting the best one to respond to each content request. In the meantime, a certain amount of spectrum resource is bought from the operator to satisfy the user's QoS requirement. Finally, the payoff is divided among SBSs via a bankruptcy game, and the solution is found exploiting the Nucleolus fairness concept. A decentralized Nucleolus calculation algorithm is adopted here so that the network can work in a distributed manner.