A Game Theoretic Approach to Guarantee Fairness in Cooperation Among Green Mobile Network Operators

Energy efficiency is one of leading design principles for the current deployment of cellular mobile networks. A first driving reason for this is that half of the operating costs for the network providers comes from the energy spent to power the network, with almost 80% of it being consumed at the base stations. A second reason is related to the high environmental pollution, which makes the green cellular networks deployment mandatory. Cooperation between mobile network providers can be an effective way to reduce the CO2 emissions and, simultaneously, reduce the operating expenditures. In this paper, a game theoretic approach is proposed to introduce fairness and stability into an optimal algorithm for switching off the cooperating base stations. This aims at making such a solution more attractive in real implementation scenarios where profit-driven network providers act as rational players.