A Hierarchical Resource Allocation Game for Heterogeneous Networks with Relays

In heterogeneous relay networks, there are two types of user access connection: direct link and two-hop link. The former is used when a user accesses the Base Station (BS) directly, while the latter, composed of a backhaul link and an access link, is used when a user accesses the BS via a Relay Node (RN). For the RNs with in-band wireless backhaul, two-hop links operate in shared spectrum, and thus resource allocation is a challenging issue to provide sufficient capacity for backhaul links while maintaining fair sharing of resources with users. In this paper, we develop a hierarchical game based on Stackelberg model to address the resource allocation in relay networks. The proposed game consists of two sub-games, namely backhaul-level game and access-level game respectively. In the game model, backhaul links as leaders while access links as followers. By estimating the achievable rates of users, leaders choose their optimal strategies, and the followers do the best response to leaders´ strategies. Simulation results demonstrate that our game can guarantee the throughput balance between backhaul and access links, and thus improve the user data rates and the overall system resource utilization, compared with the resource allocation schemes which consider backhaul and access links separately.