An incentivized offloading mechanism via truthful auction in heterogeneous networks

The giant and growing data traffic from mobile service makes it drastically increase the burden for the cellular network operator to guarantee the peak traffic demand. A potential solution to increase the network capacity while saving energy is to offload part of the traffic through femtocells. In this paper, we propose a reverse auction based on Vickrey-Clarke-Grove (VCG) mechanism in the heterogeneous network, which incentives femtocell owners to rent their under-utilized spectrum for the offloading purpose. The auction allows the mobile network operator to explicitly mark their personal preferences towards different femtocells, and also take the location availability into consideration. Further, we address a greedy algorithm to avoid the high time complexity problem of VCG mechanism, which has satisfactory economic properties as well as acceptable computational complexity, and turns to be more suitable for large-size network realization.