A Pricing-Based Rate Allocation Game in TVWS Backhaul and Access Link for Rural Broadband

The traditional cellular technology is not profitable to serve the sparsely populated and clustered remote rural areas because of huge network set-up cost and lesser return from low density of rural population. To provide broadband service in those remote rural areas, in this paper, we consider a TV white space (TVWS)-based hierarchical network architecture where sparsely located clustered rural pieces of user equipment (UEs) are connected to far-off central base station (CBS) via intermediate TVWS nodes, known as the pieces of customer premises equipment (CPEs) through TVWS link. The CBS has direct broadband connectivity to the Internet through optical fiber backhaul. In such a network architecture, we adopt a two-stage market model among UEs, CPEs, CBS, and propose a pricing-based Stackelberg game to distribute the total available data rate at CBS among CPEs and then to the UE. Extensive simulations have been carried out to study the data-rate distribution, and the behavior of utilities of CPE, CBS, and UE with variation of different parameters for a particular network scenario. The study of the outcome suggests that using this simple price exchange mechanism, it is possible, based on each UE's willingness-to-pay and the total available data rate, to distribute data rate optimally among the UEs where each of the network entities behaves selfishly.