Improving Spectrum Efficiency of Cell-Edge Devices by Incentive Architecture Applications With Dynamic Charging

The gap between the peak-hour Internet and the average level is increasing, which inevitably creates a type of temporary cellular weak coverage when there is a surge in data traffic demand, where any cell-edge device will have a low spectrum efficiency (SE). In this article, we propose a novel incentive architecture based on the dynamic radio frequency charging technology to improve the SE and use the Stackelberg game theory to formulate the problem. In such a model, a small base station (SBS) acts as the leader to offer a desired partition of the resource block obtained by a cell-edge device, while some small energy providers (SEPs) and small virtual access points (SVAPs) that are selected from user equipment act as the followers to make their decisions, respectively, to compete for the free part of such a resource block. Following the potential game rules, all the SEPs compete for a specific free resource part allocated by the SBS, and then, all the SVAPs compete for another nonoverlapping part allocated by the SBS on the basis of the results of the SEPs’ potential game. Although our incentive architecture formally has three game stages, it is essentially a two-level Stackelberg game, which is analyzed by using a backward induction method. The theoretical analysis proves the convergence of the above-mentioned game models, and the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed incentive architecture can improve the SE for each cell-edge device.