A Hybrid Approach for Radio Resource Management in Heterogeneous Cognitive Networks

Distributing Radio Resource Management (RRM) in heterogeneous wireless networks is an important research and development axis that aims at reducing network complexity. In this context, RRM decision making can be delegated to mobiles by incorporating cognitive capabilities into mobile handsets, resulting in the reduction of signalling and processing burden. This may however result in inefficiencies (such as those known as the "tragedy of commons") that are inherent to equilibria in noncooperative games. Due to the concern for efficiency, centralized network architectures and protocols keep being considered and being compared to decentralized ones. From the point of view of the network architecture, this implies the co-existence of network-centric and terminal-centric RRM 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. At some system's states, the network manager may impose his decisions on the network users. In other states the mobiles may take autonomous actions in reaction to information sent by the network. In order to improve the performance of the non-cooperative scenario, we investigate the properties of an alternative solution concept named Stackelberg game, in which the network tries to control the users' behavior by broadcasting appropriate information, expected to maximize its utility, while individual users maximize their own utility. We derive analytically the utilities related to the Quality of Service (QoS) perceived by mobile 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 system that serve streaming and elastic flows.