Stackelberg game for backhaul resource allocation in the two-tier LTE femtocell networks

Abstract

As one promising technology for indoor coverage and service offloading from the conventional cellular networks, femtocells have attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, most of previous work are focused on resource allocation during the access period, and the backhaul involved resource allocation is seriously ignored. The authors studied the backhaul resource allocation in the wireless backhaul based two-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets), in which cross-tier interference control during access period is jointly considered. Assuming that the macrocell base station (MBS) protects itself from interference by pricing the backhaul spectrum allocated to femtocells, a Stackelberg game is formulated to work on the joint utility maximization of the macrocell and femtocells subject to a maximum interference tolerance at the MBS. The closed-form expressions of the optimal strategies are obtained to characterize the Stackelberg equilibriums for the proposed games, and a backhaul spectrum payment selection algorithm with guaranteed convergence is proposed to implement the backhaul resource allocation for femtocell base stations (FBSs). Simulations are presented to demonstrate the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) is obtained by the proposed algorithm and the proposed scheme is effective in backhaul resource allocation and macrocell protection in the spectrum-sharing HetNets.