A Distributed Offloading Market for 5G Heterogeneous Networks

Concerns have been raised regarding the economical viability for each operator to have a full regional 5G coverage. A possible solution is to have traffic offloaded to competitors. In this work we present a new scheme for optimal offloading in a stochastic environment. This is more in line with the conditions 5G base stations will face with changing link and traffic conditions. The problem is formulated as a Stackelberg game, and the players' utility functions are derived though queuing models. Numerical results illustrate that our scheme provides a global optimal resource allocation up to a threshold. The threshold is a function of the traffic load and the number of offloading candidates. Beyond the threshold players still have incentives to participate, but the market equilibrium is not globally optimal.