The research paper “Auction-based Offloading for Base Station Switching Off in Heterogeneous Networks” presented in the 25th European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC 2016) conference and authored by the Head of the SMARTECH Department Dr. Christos Verikoukis, in collaboration with Ms.. Alexandra Bousia, Dr. Elli Kartsakli, Dr. Angelos Antonopoulos and Dr. Luis Alonso, has received the Best Student Paper Award of EuCNC2016/EURACON.
The paper considers a novel business model for 5G HetNets scenarios where a third-party is the infrastructure provider of the deployed Small Cells (SC) and the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) lease the SC resources in order to fully offload their traffic and deactivate their Base Stations (BSs). Motivated by the conflicting interests of the MNOs and the restricted capacity of the SCs that is not sufficient to carry the whole traffic in multi-operator scenarios, the paper introduces a combinatorial auction framework, which includes: i) a bidding strategy, ii) a resource allocation scheme, and iii) a pricing rule. A multiobjective framework is proposed, to provide an energy efficient solution for the resource allocation problem. Extensive analytical and experimental results show that proposed solution can reach and improvement of up to 252% in energy efficiency, with respect to state-of-the-art reference scenarios.
The work has been partially funded by AGAUR (2014SGR 1551) and by CellFive (TEC2014-60130-P) Research Projects.
