Stackelberg game for spectrum reuse in the two-tier LTE femtocell network

As an effective solution for indoor coverage and service offloading from the conventional cellular networks, femtocells have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. From the perspective of spectral efficiency, the macrocell base station (MBS) and femtocell base stations (FBSs) are usually deployed in the same spectrum. Then the interference problem has become a key obstruction that limits the network performance. In this paper, we study the spectrum reuse in the two-tier LTE femtocell network. In order to improve the network performance, the FBSs are encouraged to provide services to nearby macrocell users, and the MBS releases a fractional spectrum to the FBSs for avoiding cross-tier interference in return. We model this problem as a Stackelberg game where the MBS acts as a leader and the FBSs as the followers. We define the utilities for the MBS and FBSs as the average throughput and the distortion-rate function, respectively. It is worth noting that in our Stackelberg game model, there is no monetary price for the interaction between the leader and followers, which is the significant distinction from previous works. The optimal strategies of spectrum reuse for both MBS and FBSs are proposed by analyzing the Stackelberg game model. The simulation results show that the proposed spectrum reuse scheme can significantly improve the network performance.