Price Discount Strategy for WSP to Promote Hybrid Access in Femtocell Networks

Femtocell technology, which aims at improving indoor signal coverage and offloading traffic from macro base stations (MBSs), has attracted interest in wireless industry. Among all the access methods, hybrid access proves to be the most promising one. However, it is difficult to promote the hybrid access mode since all the femto holders (FHs) merely care about their own benefits. In this paper, we propose a price discount strategy for wireless service provider (WSP) to promote the hybrid access mode of femtocell in which WSP provides a price discount in exchange for the femto holders to share part of their resource to macro users. The problem is formulated and analyzed as a Stackelberg game where WSP acts as the leader and femto holders as the followers. The optimal resource allocation ratio for each FH is decided independently and the optimal price discount factor for WSP is also obtained. Furthermore, we analyze how the bandwidth allocation strategy will affect the utility of WSP and an optimal bandwidth allocation ratio is decided. Numerical results show that both WSP and femto holders can benefit from the price discount strategy.