Introducing fairness in cooperation among Green mobile network operators

Nowadays, energy efficiency is one of leading design principles for the deployment of cellular mobile networks. One reason for this is that half of the operating costs for the network providers comes from the energy spent to power the network, with almost 80% of it being consumed at the base stations. The other reason is related to the high environmental pollution, which makes the green deployment mandatory. Cooperation between mobile network providers in the same geographical area can be an effective way to reduce the CO₂ emissions and, simultaneously, reduce the operating expenditures. It has already been demonstrated that the base stations of cooperating providers can be sequentially switched off to achieve the above-mentioned goals. In this paper, a game theoretic model is proposed to introduce fairness and stability into the algorithm for switching off the cooperating base stations. This aims at making such a solution more attractive in real implementation scenarios where profit-driven network providers act as rational players.