Pricing mechanisms for interference management games in femtocell networks based on Markov modeling

The potential massive deployment of femto access points requires femto-cell networks to be able to take interference under control, possibly through a decentralized mechanism. Within this context, game theory represents a fundamental tool to devise decentralized algorithms for dynamic resource allocation. In this paper, we propose alternative game-theoretic techniques that exploit the backhaul link among femto-access points to set up local coordination games which provide performance advantages with respect to purely competitive games. The proposed optimization techniques incorporate a Markovian model of the interference activity and propose alternative pricing mechanisms to allocate power in the joint time-frequency plane. © 2011 IIMC.