Fair scheduling in cellular systems in the presence of noncooperative mobiles

We consider the problem of 'fair' scheduling the resources to one of the many mobile stations by a centrally controlled base station (BS). The BS is the only entity taking decisions in this framework based on truthful information from the mobiles on their radio channel. We study the well-known family of parametric -fair scheduling problems from a gametheoretic perspective in which some of the mobiles may be noncooperative. We first show that if the BS is unaware of the noncooperative behavior from the mobiles, the noncooperative mobiles become successful in snatching the resources from the other cooperative mobiles, resulting in unfair allocations. If the BS is aware of the noncooperative mobiles, a new game arises with BS as an additional player. It can then do better by neglecting the signals from the noncooperative mobiles. The BS, however, becomes successful in eliciting the truthful signals from the mobiles only when it uses additional information (signal statistics). This new policy along with the truthful signals from mobiles forms a Nash Equilibrium (NE) which we call a Truth Revealing Equilibrium. Finally, we propose new iterative algorithms to implement fair scheduling policies that robustify the otherwise non-robust (in presence of noncooperation) fair scheduling algorithms

Opportunistic scheduling in cellular systems in the presence of non-cooperative mobiles

A central scheduling problem in wireless communications is that of allocating resources to one of many mobile stations that have a common radio channel. Much attention has been given to the design of efficient and fair scheduling schemes that are centrally controlled by a base station (BS) whose decisions depend on the channel conditions of each mobile. The BS is the only entity taking decisions in this framework based on truthful information from the mobiles on their radio channel. In this paper, we study the scheduling problem from a game-theoretic perspective in which some of the mobiles may be noncooperative. We model this as a signaling game and study its equilibria. We then propose various approaches to enforce truthful signaling of the radio channel conditions: a pricing approach, an approach based on some knowledge of the mobiles ’ policies, and an approach that replaces this knowledge by a stochastic approximations approach that combines estimation and control. We further identify other equilibria that involve non-truthful signaling. We finally discuss the proportional fair framework under the noncooperative setting. I