Resource Allocation for Mobile Data Offloading Through Third-Party Cognitive Small Cells

Mobile data offloading is considered as an effective way to solve the network overloading issue. In this paper, we study the mobile data offloading problem through a third-party cognitive small cell providing data offloading service to a macrocell. Particularly, four scenarios, namely, successive interference cancellation (SIC) available at neither the macrocell base station (MBS) nor the small cell BS (SBS), SIC available at both the MBS and the SBS, SIC available at only the MBS, and SIC available at only the SBS are considered. For all the four scenarios, iterative optimization based data offloading schemes are proposed. We show that the proposed data offloading schemes outperform the corresponding schemes without data offloading. We also show that equipping SIC at the SBS is more beneficial compared to equipping SIC at the MBS.