No abstract

Mobile data offloading through complementary network is an efficient approach to mitigate network congestion and enhance user's Quality of Service (QoS). Data offloading techniques require the investigation of economic benefits for service providers, conflicts resulting from the interplay of different agents, and proper cooperation of the entities involved in the process. Game theory uses mathematical models to understand the interactions among multiagents. It can be utilized to analyse individual or group behaviour of entities for data offloading. Game theory also models the selfish behaviour of nodes and accordingly is useful in designing the reward/punishment mechanisms for the players involved in data offloading game. In this survey, we present an exhaustive review of game models developed to motivate small cell operators, for providing hybrid access in the heterogeneous networks. Specifically, this review aims to cover network-initiated data offloading approaches, in which the cellular operator controls the offloading procedure.

No abstract

In cellular communication systems, the introduction of device-to-device (D2D) communications provides a reasonable solution to facilitate high data rate services in short-range communication. However, it faces a challenging issue of interference management, where the cross-tier interference from D2D users to licensed cellular users (CUs) degrades their quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. D2D communications can also assist in offloading some nearby CUs to enhance the cellular operator's benefit. To encourage the D2D transmitters (D2DT) to provide service to CUs in the dead zone, the cellular base station (CBS) needs to incentivize it with some monetary benefits. In this paper, a Stackelberg game-based joint pricing framework for interference management and data offloading is presented to illustrate the effects of cooperation between the D2D user and CBS. Specifically, a singular price is used to incentivize the D2DT to share its resources with the far-off CUs along with penalizing them for interference created at CBS. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed technique in terms of the utilities of CUs and D2D users for varying distances of D2DT.Electronics 2020, 9, 408 2 of 13 is not used by proximal cellular users (CU). This technique perhaps may not increase spectrum usage considering that D2D devices use a distinct resource with the CUs. (ii) Underlay mode: In underlay or reuse mode, D2D devices can use the same spectrum resource as the cellular users, on the condition of creating tolerable interference to their communication. This mode can substantially enhance system capacity. Moreover, the cellular operators can also make more profit through additional charges obtained from CUs for providing D2D service. In this paper, the focus is on the underlay spectrum sharing mode, where the D2D pairs reuse the spectrum of the CUs. One of the fundamental research challenges in reuse mode is the severe interference created in the cellular network by D2D communication due to the usage of shared spectrum resources. To ensure the quality-of-service (QoS) of cellular users, various interference mitigation techniques have been studied in the literature. In [8], the authors proposed a power control mechanism to control the peak transmission power of D2D transmitters (D2DT) by the base station. In [9], a more innovative technique was introduced, where resource allocation along with the power control technique was used to combat the interference from D2D to cellular users and vice versa. A spectrum splitting framework was developed in [10] to minimize interference in the D2D-cellular network. To assist in the uplink transmission of CUs to BS, relay nodes were selected in [11], and network coding was applied for the actual transmission. In [12], a multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming technique for the multiple-antenna D2D underlying cellular network based on estimated channel state information (CSI) was presented.In addition to interference management using power control, our scheme essenti...

No abstract