Auction-based energy-spectrum trading in green cognitive cellular networks

Green communications has received much attention recently. For cellular networks, the base stations (BSs) account for more than 50 percent of the energy consumption of the networks. Therefore, reducing the power consumption of BSs is crucial to enhance the energy efficiency of cellular networks. Meanwhile, the mobile data traffic is expected to increase exponentially. To accommodate the increasing data traffic with the limited radio frequency, enhancing the spectrum efficiency is critical for next generation cellular networks. In this paper, we propose an auction-based energy-spectrum trading scheme which exploits the cooperation between primary base stations (PBSs) and the secondary base stations (SBSs) to enhance the energy as well as spectrum efficiency of cellular networks. In the cooperation, by leveraging cognitive radio, PBSs share the licensed spectrum with SBSs, and the SBSs provide data service to the primary users under its coverage utilizing the shared bandwidth. The cooperation between PSBs and SBSs can significantly improve the energy and spectral efficiency of cellular networks. However, optimizing the bandwidth sharing between PBSs and SBSs is an NP-hard problem. Solving such problem using centralized algorithms is not computationally efficient, especially when considering a large number of PBSs and SBSs. Thus, we design an auction-based decentralized mechanism to enable the cooperation between PBSs and SBSs. Simulation results that demonstrated the performance and viability of the proposed decentralized mechanism.