Locally cooperative traffic-offloading in multi-mode small cell networks: Potential games

The next generation of small cell base stations (SCBSs), with multi-mode specialty, can offload part of traffic load to unlicensed spectrum to alleviate burden in licensed band. In this paper, we propose an interference graph to capture the coupling interference relationship in unlicensed band between small cell. Based on the interference graph, we formulated the traffic-offloading issue as the local cooperation game. In addition, we prove that the proposed game is an exact potential game which has at least one pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE), which maximize the total network sum-rate. Furthermore, we design a distributed iterative learning algorithm to explore the optimal pure strategy NE point of the game.