Femto-matching: Efficient traffic offloading in heterogeneous cellular networks

Heterogeneous cellular networks use small base stations, such as femtocells and WiFi APs, to offload traffic from macrocells. While network operators wish to globally balance the traffic, users may selfishly select the nearest base stations and make some base stations overcrowded. In this paper, we propose to use an auction-based algorithm - Femto-Matching, to achieve both load balancing among base stations and fairness among users. Femto-Matching optimally solves the global proportional fairness problem in polynomial time by transforming it into an equivalent matching problem. Furthermore, it can efficiently utilize the capacity of randomly deployed small cells. Our trace-driven simulations show Femto-Matching can reduce the load of macrocells by more than 30% compared to non-cooperative game based strategies.