A Distributed Network Selection Method Based on Minority Game for LTE in Unlicensed Bands

The long term evolution-unlicensed (LTE-U) has been introduced by the third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to meet the continued insufficient capacity challenges. As multi-radio access technology (RAT) HetNets gradually become the mainstream, RAT coordination and user association issues arise from the extensions of cellular networks to unlicensed bands, for fair and harmonious coexistence with other RATs such as Win. In this work, we propose for the first time a distributed method of RAT selection and user association based on minority game, where users self-organize to achieve a balanced state between the cellular and WiFi networks while seeking their own interests. This distributive method only requires minimal external information from the environment and low computational complexity. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our distributed method. Furthermore, our work could be extended to handle distributed RAT coordination and user association issues in other scenarios.