Title :
A cooperation framework for traffic offloading among cellular systems
Author :
Nguyen, Diep N. ; Collings, Iain B. ; Hanly, Stephen V. ; Whiting, Philip
Author_Institution :
Department of Engineering, Macquarie University, Australia
Abstract :
This work introduces a novel cooperation framework that allows mobile service providers (MSPs) to offload traffic onto each other so that temporarily unused spectrum/resources of cellular bands can be opportunistically harvested. Specifically, through traffic offloading, MSPs aim to maximize their profit while maintaining their QoS commitment. For that purpose, we model the strategic cooperation between MSPs as a stochastic Markov game in which the dynamics of MSPs´ resources and user behaviors are captured by an underlying Markov decision process. We prove that the game is irreducible and admits a Nash Equilibrium at which all MSPs benefit from traffic offloading. A practical algorithm that uses only local information to govern traffic offloading at MSPs is then developed. Numerical simulations show that by designing appropriate profit sharing contracts, this algorithm can achieve almost the same performance as that of a socially optimal solution.
Keywords :
Algorithm design and analysis; Dynamic scheduling; Games; Markov processes; Quality of service; Wireless communication; Markov game; Traffic offloading; cellular;
Conference_Titel :
Communications (ICC), 2015 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
London, United Kingdom
DOI :
10.1109/ICC.2015.7248559