A Dynamic Hierarchical Game Approach for User Association and Resource Allocation in HetNets With Wireless Backhaul
Bo Huang, Aihuang Guo
Abstract
This letter proposes a dynamic hierarchical game approach to investigate the user association and resource allocation in heterogeneous networks (HetNets), in which small cell base stations (SBS) are wirelessly backhauled by macro base stations (MBS). At the user level, an evolutionary game is used to model users’ base station (BS) association strategies, where users make service selection decisions dynamically according to time-varying access and backhaul capacity requirements. At the resource level, a Stackelberg differential game based resource allocation mechanism is proposed considering the dynamic user association at the user level evolutionary game, in which MBS as a leader decides the pricing strategy of backhaul bandwidth as well as SBSs as followers optimize the access throughput and backhaul bandwidth allocation. Simulation results show the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed approach in HetNets with wireless backhaul.