Bayesian mechanism based inter-operator base station sharing for energy saving

In cellular networks, the coverage of base stations (BSs) belonging to different operators often overlaps. As a result, when the traffic load is lower than the peak volume, there are opportunities to turn off a subset of BSs to save power, potentially from different operators, leaving their users to be served by other BSs. Because in this case the active BSs can be shared among different operators, it is rational to assume that operators are self-interested and hold their own private information, such as their own traffic loads. In this paper, we consider the problem of how to motivate operators to cooperate and reveal their private information such that the overall utility can be maximized, which is also called social efficiency in mechanism design. A new BS utility model that depends on the BS´s energy consumption is proposed. Based on this, a game theoretic mechanism with money transfer between operators is designed, which has been proved to be incentive compatible and budget-balanced. Simulation results under various traffic load distributions show that when the operators have similar traffic load distributions, they would like to participate the cooperation voluntarily.