Joint pricing and power allocation for uplink macrocell and femtocell cooperation

In this paper, we study cooperation among mobile users for uplink in two-tiers heterogeneous wireless networks. In our cooperative model, a macrocell user equipment can relay its data via a femtocell user equipment when it cannot connect to its macro base station or any femtocell base stations directly. In this scenario, the macrocell user equipment tries to find the best relay user in a set of candidate relay femtocell user equipments to maximize its utility function. Additionally, the candidate relay femtocell user equipments give a pricing-based strategy per each power unit to the macrocell user equipment along with power level at relay femtocell user equipments which would be used for relaying data in order to maximize both the relay femto and macrocell user equipment´s utility function. In static network environment, this problem is formulated as a Stackelberg game. Moreover, in stochastic network environment we find stochastic optimization in a long-term for both the utility functions by modeling the problem as a restless bandit problem. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency of our proposal.