SINR base station placement and mobile association games under cooperation

In this paper we study the hierarchical decision making problem of base station (BS) placement and mobile terminals association in a wireless communication system. Our approach extends previous work by considering the level of cooperation between BSs in the utility functions. We first address the problem of association of mobile terminals to the BSs, which determines the cell partition. This is studied in a non-cooperative context where, given a BSs placement, each mobile connects to the BS that provides it with the best signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) - i.e., mobiles compete to achieve a better SINR. Then we consider the problem of determining the optimal locations of the BSs, taking into account the association behavior of the mobiles that will be induced by the location decisions. We study the problem in the general setting of a parametrized level of cooperation between BSs, showing the corresponding parametric utility functions and the resulting symmetric Nash equilibrium for the hierarchical Stackelberg-like problem.