Auction Based Spectrum Efficient Offloading Mechanism in HetNets

The explosive growth of cellular data traffic demands poses a heavy burden to the cellular service provider (CSP), making it urgent to offload part of the cellular traffic through already-deployed third-party owned small cells. Auction based offloading is a promising method of traffic offloading, but the existing related works haven't considered the utilization efficiency of the leased spectrum resource. In this paper, we present and analyze a reverse auction to deploy an innovative market for tradeoff between the lower leasing cost and larger amount of offloading traffic, aiming to maximize the benefit of CSPs. Furthermore, we propose a greedy offloading mechanism to reach the tradeoff and spectrum efficiency with low complexity. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed greedy mechanism can make a good compromise between the offloading cost and the offloading traffic.