The impact of bundling licensed and unlicensed wireless service

Unlicensed spectrum has been viewed as a way to increase competition in wireless access and promote innovation in new technologies and business models. However, several recent papers have shown that the openness of such spectrum can also lead to it becoming over congested when used by competing wireless service providers (SPs). This in turn can result in the SPs making no profit and may deter them from entering the market. However, this prior work assumes that unlicensed access is a separate service from any service offered using licensed spectrum. Here, we instead consider the more common case were service providers bundle both licensed and unlicensed spectrum as a single service and offer this with a single price. We analyze a model for such a market and show that in this case SPs are able to gain higher profit than the case without bundling. It is also possible to get higher social welfare with bundling. Moreover, we explore the case where SPs are allowed to manage the customers' average percentage of time they receive service on unlicensed spectrum and characterize the social welfare gap between the profit maximizing and social welfare maximizing setting.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, accepted and to appear at IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 201

Quantized VCG Mechanisms for Polymatroid Environments

Many network resource allocation problems can be viewed as allocating a divisible resource, where the allocations are constrained to lie in a polymatroid. We consider market-based mechanisms for such problems. Though the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism can provide the efficient allocation with strong incentive properties (namely dominant strategy incentive compatibility), its well-known high communication requirements can prevent it from being used. There have been a number of approaches for reducing the communication costs of VCG by weakening its incentive properties. Here, instead we take a different approach of reducing communication costs via quantization while maintaining VCG's dominant strategy incentive properties. The cost for this approach is a loss in efficiency which we characterize. We first consider quantizing the resource allocations so that agents need only submit a finite number of bids instead of full utility function. We subsequently consider quantizing the agent's bids

Tinkering Toward Accolades: School Gaming Under a Performance Accountability System

We explore the extent to which schools manipulate the composition of students in the test-taking pool in order to maximize ratings under Texas' accountability system in the 1990s. We first derive predictions from a static model of administrators' incentives given the structure of the ratings criteria, and then test these predictions by comparing differential changes in exemption rates across student subgroups within campuses and across campuses and regimes. Our analyses uncover evidence of a moderate degree of strategic behavior, so that there is some tension between designing systems that account for heterogeneity in student populations and that are manipulation-free.

Co-primary inter-operator spectrum sharing over a limited spectrum pool using repeated games

We consider two small cell operators deployed in the same geographical area, sharing spectrum resources from a common pool. A method is investigated to coordinate the utilization of the spectrum pool without monetary transactions and without revealing operator-specific information to other parties. For this, we construct a protocol based on asking and receiving spectrum usage favors by the operators, and keeping a book of the favors. A spectrum usage favor is exchanged between the operators if one is asking for a permission to use some of the resources from the pool on an exclusive basis, and the other is willing to accept that. As a result, the proposed method does not force an operator to take action. An operator with a high load may take spectrum usage favors from an operator that has few users to serve, and it is likely to return these favors in the future to show a cooperative spirit and maintain reciprocity. We formulate the interactions between the operators as a repeated game and determine rules to decide whether to ask or grant a favor at each stage game. We illustrate that under frequent network load variations, which are expected to be prominent in small cell deployments, both operators can attain higher user rates as compared to the case of no coordination of the resource utilization.Comment: To be published in proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) at London, Jun. 201

Opportunistic Splitting Algorithms for Wireless Networks with Fairness Constraints

In wireless networks, it is well established that the throughput can be increased by opportunistically scheduling transmissions to users that have good channel conditions. Several “opportunistic” medium access control protocols have been developed, which enable distributed users to opportunistically transmit without requiring a centralized scheduler. In this paper, we consider opportunistic splitting algorithms, where a sequence of mini-slots is used to determine the appropriate user to schedule at each time. In prior work, this type of algorithm has been developed for homogeneous systems in which all users have independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channel statistics. Here, we specify new splitting algorithms for a heterogeneous environment that may also include fairness constraints. The performance of the splitting algorithms are characterized via analysis and simulations. In particular, we show that in certain cases, a heterogeneous algorithm will perform at least as well as the homogeneous algorithm in a system with the same total number of users

Distributed Resource Allocation and Scheduling in OFDMA Wireless Networks

In this paper we develop distributed resource allocation and scheduling algorithms for the uplink of an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) wireless network. We consider a time-slotted model, where in each time-slot the users are assigned to subchannels consisting of groups of OFDM tones. Each user can also allocate its transmission power among the subchannels it is assigned. We consider distributed algorithms for accomplishing this, where each user’s actions depend only on knowledge of their own channel gains. Assuming a collision model for each subchannel, we characterize an optimal policy which maximizes the system throughput and also give a simpler sub-optimal policy. We study the scaling behavior of these policies in several asymptotic regimes for a broad class of fading distributions

Distributed Power Allocation and Scheduling for Parallel Channel Wireless Networks

In this paper, we develop distributed approaches for power allocation and scheduling in wireless access networks. We consider a model where users communicate over a set of parallel multi-access fading channels, as in an OFDM or multi-carrier system. At each time, each user must decide which channels to transmit on and how to allocate its power over these channels. We give distributed power allocation and scheduling policies where each user’s actions depend only on knowledge of their own channel gains. We characterize an optimal policy which maximizes the system throughput and also give a simpler sub-optimal policy which is shown to have the optimal scaling behavior in several asymptotic regimes