Joint college admissions game and auction theory for data offloading in heterogeneous networks

Mobile data offloading through third-party Femtocell access points (FAPs) is an emerging technology which is used to alleviate congestion in cellular network. We propose a distributed algorithm that combines college admissions game with auction theory to achieve the maximum social welfare of offloading and guarantee the Quality of service (QoS) of Mobile users (MUs). As the optimal problem is NP-hard, the college admissions game is developed to solve the sub-problem of matching between FAPs and MUs. The Second revenue sealed-bid auction with a reserve price (SRSARP) algorithm is developed to solve another sub-problem of matching between Wireless operators (WOs) and FAPs. The simulation results reveal that the distributed algorithm we proposed achieves the performance very close to that of the centralized method and significantly better than those of the random and Max-price algorithms.