Double Auction Offloading: Challenges and Opportunities for Energy Efficient Telecommunication Networks

Abstract

The continuing traffic growth and the need for improved user experience and ubiquitous connectivity force the industry to extend the telecommunications network infrastructure by installing numerous Base Stations (BSs) and Small Cells (SCs), thus incurring significant additional capital and operational expenditures. As a result, energy and cost effective solutions for network management are sought. In this paper, we introduce the concept of traffic offloading and infrastructure sharing, where operators can either buy and sell capacity and roam their traffic among each other, or they can offload their traffic to third party operating SCs. These mechanisms enable full utilization of cell capacity when the traffic is high and savings on low traffic BSs and SCs, which can be switched off when the traffic is low. As there are multiple stakeholders in the same geographical area, different network architectures and their particular aspects (e.g., infrastructure and spectrum ownership, role in the market, responsibilities and demands) must be taken into consideration. We propose a double auction mechanism that reconciles the different interests and demands of the participants and we assess the performance of the resulting system in terms of energy for different traffic loads. © 2021 ACM.