Energy-efficient precoded coordinated multi-point transmission with pricing power game mechanism

The coordinated multiple-point (CoMP) transmission technique recently has been considered as an efficient method to achieve energy-efficient cellular wireless communications and enhance cell-edge user performance. Conventional energy-efficient power allocation in CoMP is based simply on water filling (WF) without considering frequency diversity (different base station clustering and user scheduling results in each subband). For the single-antenna scenario without the involvement of precoding, we have recently proposed a noncooperative power game (PG) mechanism with pricing for power allocation as an interference coordination method to improve energy efficiency and throughput performance. In this paper, we generalize the noncooperative pricing game mechanism with pricing across both frequency and space in the scenario of multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output-based CoMP transmissions. First, a block diagonalization precoding-based CoMP transmission system is reformulated as multiple single-antenna transmit-receive pairs from a viewpoint of streams. Second, taking frequency diversity into account, we propose a novel WF power-allocation algorithm to provide the power strategy space (the range of power of streams), based on which PG in each stream is further proposed. Thus, the noncooperative PG with pricing can be executed in all streams. Extensive simulation results then demonstrate the effectiveness of the new proposal.863 High-Technology Plan, 2015AA01A707 / China Scholarship Council Progra

Game Theory for Multi-Access Edge Computing:Survey, Use Cases, and Future Trends

Game theory (GT) has been used with significant success to formulate, and either design or optimize, the operation of many representative communications and networking scenarios. The games in these scenarios involve, as usual, diverse players with conflicting goals. This paper primarily surveys the literature that has applied theoretical games to wireless networks, emphasizing use cases of upcoming multiaccess edge computing (MEC). MEC is relatively new and offers cloud services at the network periphery, aiming to reduce service latency backhaul load, and enhance relevant operational aspects such as quality of experience or security. Our presentation of GT is focused on the major challenges imposed by MEC services over the wireless resources. The survey is divided into classical and evolutionary games. Then, our discussion proceeds to more specific aspects which have a considerable impact on the game's usefulness, namely, rational versus evolving strategies, cooperation among players, available game information, the way the game is played (single turn, repeated), the game's model evaluation, and how the model results can be applied for both optimizing resource-constrained resources and balancing diverse tradeoffs in real edge networking scenarios. Finally, we reflect on lessons learned, highlighting future trends and research directions for applying theoretical model games in upcoming MEC services, considering both network design issues and usage scenarios