Small cell deployment in licensed/unlicensed band: A local interaction game framework

The rapidly growing mobile traffic urges the spectrum scarcity. An insightful and effective approach is to use additional spectrum to improve network capacity. In Rel-13, LTE deployment in unlicensed bands (LTE-U) is being considered. Technically, LTE-U can be deployed with the small cell. Then small cell can access both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Unlicensed spectrum is free to use but will be shared by all small cells while licensed spectrum has to be paid. In this paper, we try to maximize sum utility of small cells with the consideration of operating bandwidth constraint. Each small cell has to decide which channels should be selected in licensed and unlicensed band. The local interaction game framework is introduced to solve the optimization problem. The game is proved to be an exact potential game and the optimal action profile for small cells constitutes a pure strategy NE. We then proposed a spatial adaptive play (SAP)-based L/U channel selection algorithm to achieve the optimal action profile. Simulation validates the efficiency of the algorithm.