Resource Management in 4G Wireless Communications at Vehicular Speeds: A Game Theory Solution

Poor cell-edge throughput is a well recognized problem in wireless communication technologies including 4G. Inter-cell interference (ICI), low signal to noise ratio (SNR) and inability to use an efficient modulation scheme in a low SNR environment are major problems in cell-edge regions in a multi- cell communication environment, which severely limits the spectral efficiency and cell-edge throughput. Mobility at vehicular speeds adds another dimension of problem for cell-edge users mainly because bit error rate increases exponentially with increasing vehicular speeds due to the multipath problem. 4G standards like LTE-A and WiMAX are currently considering various options to address this problem of low cell-edge throughput. One such option is to split the total radio resource among the cell center and cell-edge region, which allows frequency reuse, reduces ICI in cell-edge area, and supports CoMP transmission. In this paper, we show that simple resource splitting strategy like this, is not sufficient to support wireless communications at vehicular speeds. We propose a game theoretic model to resource management in 4G networks, which works well with nodes moving at high vehicular speeds. The ultimate benefit of the proposed scheme includes lower connection dropping rates for mobile nodes and higher revenue return for the service providers.