A Stackelberg game-based spectrum allocation scheme in macro/femtocell hierarchical networks

Abstract Femtocells widely deployed in a macrocell form hierarchical cell networks, which can improve indoor coverage and network capacity, and have been regarded as one of the most promising approaches. However owing to the absence of coordination between the macro and femtocells, and among femtocells, decentralized spectrum allocation between macro and femtocell users become technically challenging. In this paper, a dynamic spectrum allocation scheme based on Stackelberg game is proposed, in which macrocell base stations as leaders and femtocell base stations as followers are players, and the same spectrum is the resource that players will choose assigning to users for minimizing the affected interference among each other. The Stackelberg equilibrium is defined and proved to be existed, which is also the optimal spectrum allocation manner. Simulations were conducted to study the impact of femtocells on the macrocells regarding throughput, outage probability and spectrum efficiency. And the comparison results show that the proposed scheme might be a solution for efficiently allocating the spectrum in hierarchical cell networks, as the improvement in terms of throughput, outage probability and spectrum efficiency had been achieved.