On-Demand Resource-Sharing Mechanism Design in Two-Tier OFDMA Femtocell Networks

Femtocells are a promising technology to improve network performance with short-range, low-power, and cost-beneficial small base stations. There will be many prospective benefits by applying the femtocell technique to wireless communication standards such as the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), WiMAX, and Long-Term Evolution. This paper studies two main design issues in orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) femtocell networks, i.e., resource sharing and femtocell access control. Unlike other previous works, our presented analysis encompasses modeling wireless users´ selfish characteristic and private traffic information. In addition, this provides a more comprehensive perspective on self-organizing femtocell networks, where users optimize their performance in a distributed manner. Our contributions are threefold: 1) We design a resource allocation mechanism that gathers selfish users´ true private traffic information. 2) The proposed mechanism achieves efficient and fair resource sharing. 3) Based on the proposed mechanism, we create incentives for subscribers to share their femtobase stations with general users. This further improves the overall system performance.