A truthful auction based incentive framework for femtocell access

As cellular operators are suffering from a data explosion problem, and users are consequently experiencing poor data services, the introduction of femtocells offers a cost-effective way to mitigate this problem. Femtocells enable larger network capacity by increasing spatial reuse of the spectrum and shortening the distance to the users. Existing work has shown that open access femtocells, which allow unregistered macro users to connect, are efficient in reducing inter-cell interference and offloading traffic. However, a major obstacle constraining the potential capability of femtocells and open access is the lack of incentives for privately-owned femtocells to serve unregistered users. Hence in this paper, we propose a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction based incentive framework for accessing such selfish femtocells. We consider two scenarios: One scenario involves a single macro user and another scenario has multiple macro users. We design auction schemes for both scenarios and show analytically that our schemes are truthful and have low computational complexity. Extensive simulations validate these properties and show huge performance improvement to the macro users.