Elastic Game Based Radio Resource Management

With the abundance of diverse air interfaces in the same operating area, a mobile user is able to connect concurrently to different wireless access networks in order to meet more easily its target performance. In this paper, we consider the downlink of a multi-class hybrid network with two Radio Access Technologies (RAT): WiMAX [1] and WiFi [2]. We devise a distributed Radio Resource Management (RRM) scheme for elastic traffic that coexists with streaming traffic. The proposed scheduling policy is original in the sense that elastic users have a counterintuitive behaviour: they will try to occupy the least amount possible of bandwidth owing to their delay tolerance to accommodate QoS stringent streaming users. A non-cooperative submodular game is used to load balance the traffic of elastic users between the two available RATs aiming at minimizing their bandwidth consumption. We characterize the Nash Equilibriums (NE) of the resource management game and study the efficiency of a distributed algorithm based on best response dynamics to achieve those equilibriums. The game is played upon every new arrival and an admission control scheme is used to limit the number of ongoing connections so that admitted elastic flows are sustained with a guaranteed minimal rate.