Location-Aware Incentive Mechanism for Traffic Offloading in Heterogeneous Networks: A Stackelberg Game Approach

This article investigates the traffic offloading problem in the heterogeneous network. The location of small cells is considered as an important factor in two aspects: the amount of resources they share for offloaded macrocell users and the performance enhancement they bring after offloading. A location-aware incentive mechanism is therefore designed to incentivize small cells to serve macrocell users. Instead of taking the amount of resources shared as the basis of the reward division, the performance promotion brought to the macro network is taken. Meanwhile, in order to ensure the superiority of small cell users, the significance of them weighs heavier than macrocell users instead of being treated equally. The offloading problem is formulated as a Stackelberg game where the macro cell base station is the leader and small cells are followers. The Stackelberg equilibrium of the game is proved to be existing and unique. It is also proved to be the optimum of the proposed problem. Simulation and numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.