Optimal contract design for joint user association and intercell interference mitigation in heterogeneous LTE-A networks with asymmetric information

We study the problem of joint user association and intercell interference (ICI) mitigation in heterogeneous long-term evolution advanced (LTE-A) networks, presuming the absence of the precise global channel state information (CSI). We confront this problem from a contract-theoretic perspective and model the considered network as a labor market where the LTE evolved NodeBs (eNBs) are regarded as the employers offering a contract to the employees (cellular users). We explore a scenario where the wireless channels are ordered into different types according to their link gains and the cost of power consumption. It is assumed that each user knows the type of its channel but is not aware of the types of the channels belonging to other users. Hence, the channel type is regarded as the private information which is known only by the corresponding user. Under the presence of such asymmetric information, the eNBs formulate the optimal contract given by a set of the contract items (the combinations of user association, allocated spectrum, and power) and pass these items to the users, who then select the best contract items according to their channel types. The performance of a proposed contract-based resource allocation mechanism has been evaluated using the OPNET-based simulations. It has been demonstrated that the efficiency of a contract-based mechanism with asymmetric information is close to the optimal method (where the network resources are allocated based on the precise CSI). It has also been shown that the contract-based method outperforms the other relevant resource allocation techniques in terms of the total network service rate and signal-to-noise ratio.