A Hybrid Decision Approach for the Association Problem in Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

The area of networking games has had a growing impact on wireless networks. This reflects the recognition in the important scaling advantages that the service providers can benefit from by increasing the autonomy of mobiles in decision making. This may however result in inefficiencies that are inherent to equilibria in non-cooperative games. Due to the concern for efficiency, centralized protocols keep being considered and compared to decentralized ones. From the point of view of the network architecture, this implies the co-existence of network-centric and terminal centric radio resource management schemes. Instead of taking part within the debate among the supporters of each solution, we propose in this paper hybrid schemes where the wireless users are assisted in their decisions by the network that broadcasts aggregated load information. We derive the utilities related to the Quality of Service (QoS) perceived by the users and develop a Bayesian framework to obtain the equilibria. Numerical results illustrate the advantages of using our hybrid game framework in an association problem in a network composed of HSDPA and 3G LTE systems.

Unified and Distributed QoS-Driven Cell Association Algorithms in Heterogeneous Networks

“…This constraint guarantees that each user is connected to at most one BS. The third constraint (19) is the rate QoS constraint which is derived based on inequality (12). In the end, constraints (20) and (21) indicate that the association indices are binary variables, and n i j s can take integer values between zero and the maximum number of RBs at BS j.…”

Energy Efficient Resource Allocation in 5G Hybrid Heterogeneous Networks: A Game Theoretic Approach

“…In this regard, user-centric schemes have emerged as potential solutions to overcome the complexity of centralized monitoring by authorizing users to make decisions with or without network assistance at less computational complexity. The fusion of user-centric approach, which focuses on the interest of users, and network-centric approach, which focuses on the interest of network, can generate interesting results [8]. Another concern aggravated due to the drastic increase in the data traffic and substantial growth of network infrastructures is energy consumption [9].…”

Load balancing in heterogeneous networks based on distributed learning in potential games

“…An overview can be found in [4], [26]. These can be broadly classified as centralised [15], [16], [27], [28] and decentralised optimisation approaches [14], [17], [18], [29], [30]. Centralised user association rules along with inter-cell interference avoidance for load balancing are proposed in [27], [28].…”

“…Basic idea is to schedule users across the BSs in the network so that the users do not severely interfere with each other. Similar approaches where the user association decisions are modelled as Markov decision process (MDP) are presented in [15], [16]. However, centralised Mohd solutions are computationally intensive, require huge information exchange overhead, and are not scalable.…”

“…We solve an optimisation problem considering a generalised objective function that is not convex unlike in [14], [29]. It is network centric, which gives full control to the network operator, as opposed to the user centric and hybrid approaches using MDP [15], [16]. It is guaranteed to converge to the optimal Nash equilibrium (NE) rather than a sub-optimal NE when compared to [17], [18].…”