Throughput-based incentives for residential femtocells

In this paper, a) we investigate a simple throughput based incentive mechanism that could convince home users to install residential femtocells (by offering them a rate which is α > 1 times higher than the average rate received by a user associated with the macro base station), avoid most of the curse of free riders (i.e., selfish users who gets improved service just because others are investing in femto technology) and, at the end, be beneficial to both the users and the operator, and b) we propose a heuristic to compute the resource allocation supporting this incentive scheme. We show that it is cost-effective for a network operator to allocate a pool K of its licensed channels to a certain number of femto cells, even under our incentive mechanism. We first study a static scenario with fixed numbers of macro and femto users. We identify the range of values of the incentive parameter α that can be supported to reward femto users without harming macro users and we quantify the throughput gains for both macro and femto users in different situations. Then, we consider a dynamic scenario, where the number of users and the number of active femtocells change continuously, and we propose a simple and very accurate heuristic for computing K with a minimal amount of information to be collected at the macro base station. Our numerical results show that by using our proposed approach both macro and femto users are better off than in a pure macrocellular scenario.