Incentive Mechanism Design for Shared Femtocell Networks - A Mobility Pattern Analysis

In this paper, we consider the scenario of the mobile network operator (MNO) incentivizing femtocell access points (FAPs) to form a shared network. We propose an incentive mechanism under which the licensed femtocell user (FU) of each FAP can use a portion of another FAP's spectrum resources when moving into that FAP's coverage. The FAPs are rewarded based on both the amount of provided resources and the quality of service (QoS). We formulate the problem as a Stackelberg game. The MNO acts as the leader to decide incentive price. When observing the price, each FAP decides the amount of provided resources according to its type information (resource constraint, QoS and especially its licensed FU's mobility pattern). The best response functions of FAPs are first obtained and the existence of the Nash Equilibrium (NE) is investigated. And then we investigate the optimal strategy of the MNO given the FAPs' strategies. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively motivate FAPs to share their resources with each other. We will also mainly analyze the influence of FUs' mobility patterns on their adopted strategies.