Coordinated Resource Partitioning and Data Offloading in Wireless Heterogeneous Networks

In this letter, a game-theoretic framework is proposed for coordinating resource partitioning and data offloading in LTE-based heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The goal of this framework is to determine the amount of radio resources a macrocell should offer to neighboring small cells (SCs) and the amount of traffic each SC should admit from the macrocell. A two-stage Stackelberg game is applied to optimize the strategies of both the macrocell (the leader) and SCs (the followers). The macrocell's strategy is shown to be a mixed-boolean nonlinear program, which is NP-hard. To solve this problem efficiently, a branch and bound based method is proposed to obtain the global optimal. We also show that this two-stage game has a unique Stackelberg equilibrium. Numerical results show that the proposed framework outperforms the traditional design by 50% in term of offloaded data. Additionally, reduction of 14% was observed in term of cost paid by MBS.