Association Game for Conflict Resolution between UEs and Small Cells

Abstract

Small cells are expected to increase the capacity and the coverage of a wireless network. Since the transmission ranges of the small cells overlap with each other, a user equipment (UE) can be located within the service areas of multiple cells. Therefore, the association decisions made by the small cells and the UEs influence the energy efficiency of the cells and the data rates provided to the UEs. However, if they attempt to achieve their goals selfishly, the network may become instable in that a UE has to change its associated cell and a cell has to change the set of UEs associated with it frequently. To tackle the problem, in this paper, we propose an association game between UEs and cells. We cast the problem as a matching game where each player has preference over the other player. Then, we propose an association algorithm composed of a UE-side part and a cell-side part. Through simulation studies, we show that the proposed method outperforms the other methods in that it can enhance the average energy efficiency of the small cell network and the data rates that UEs can obtain from the network.