Decentralized Market-Based Radio Resource Management in Multi-Network Environments

For voice, an efficient radio resource management (RRM) essentially boils down to providing a predefined signal to interference ratio (SIR) at lowest cost possible and centralized schemes has, evidently, been an effective approach to address these problems. Delay-elastic data services, however, introduce both heterogeneous user requirements and possibilities for opportunistic RRM. One way, among others, to handle this would be to let autonomous trade-agents, acting on behalf of users, manage the radio resources, and this is our point of departure. We propose a market-based framework for decentralized RRM in environments populated by multiple, possibly heterogeneous, "access points" (APs), and the provided service for the users consists of file transfers. Resources (transmission time) are partitioned between users through a proportionally fair divisible auction. The problem at hand for the user (trade-agent), is then to determine how much resources it should purchase from the different APs in order to maximize its utility ("value for money"). Our results indicate that decentralized selfish bidding strategies are able to capitalize on temporary beneficial conditions and offer comparable performance with a centralized scheme (based on the 'muC-rule') that requires knowledge about peak data-rates, queue lengths, and preferences for all users in the system.