A win-win cooperative downlink resource allocation for green communications in a heterogeneous wireless medium

This paper investigates green downlink communications in a heterogeneous wireless medium. Base stations (BSs) with overlapped coverage cooperate with each other to save power through efficient power allocation to mobile terminals (MTs) with multi-homing capabilities. Different from the existing research, we deal with a multi-operator system where BSs of different networks are operated by different service providers. We propose a decentralized downlink power allocation strategy that guarantees mutual benefit among different service providers, so that they have incentive to cooperate. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy leads to a win-win power saving among different service providers, unlike the existing cooperative mechanisms, and is more power efficient as compared to the non-cooperative mechanisms.