Mechanism Design forWireless Networks: from Economic Models to Technical Solutions

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Mechanism Design forWireless Networks: from Economic Models to Technical
Solutions"

by

Mr. Peng LIN


ABSTRACT:

Today’s wireless communication networks are highly complex. They carry 
heterogeneous traffic in diverse environments, and usually involve 
multiple self-interested entities. There are often conflicting goals among 
the regulators, commercial operators and end users. To better build, 
understand, maintain, optimize, and upgrade such large distributed 
networks, it is important to design economic mechanisms as well as 
technologies. Past history has shown that sound technologies based on pure 
engineering considerations can fail to get adopted. Now the wireless 
networks are also at the cutting edge of their evolution, where dynamic 
spectrum accessing and cognitive radio technologies bring economics and 
incentive issues to the fore. There are opportunities to build economic 
incentives into the network architecture and protocols under development, 
and avoid the many problems that have arisen on the previous network 
system design due to their lack thereof. We discuss four typical scenarios 
in wireless network scenarios. The first one is about the cooperation 
scheme design for wireless service providers. We show that opportunities 
that they can cooperate widely exist and through cooperation they address 
the shortage of spectrum resource easily and economical efficiently. Then 
we study the deployment and management problems in Macro-femto 
heterogeneous networks from business models and technical solutions 
aspects. We classify the models into three categories: joint-deployment, 
WSP-deployment, and user-deployment. Their unique characteristics, 
corresponding challenges and potential solutions are further explored to 
provide a deeper insight from the systematic point of view. We also 
present a scheme on the WSPs revenue maximization under the WSP-deployment 
case. In the third work, we propose a cooperation framework for a mobile 
operator and a fixed-line operator. Through combining their fixed-line 
infrastructures and spectrum resources, femtocells can be deployed and 
managed. We consider both the technical and economical factors. A unique 
closed-form equilibrium is derived by Nash bargaining model, which is fair 
and efficient and thus amenable to the operators. In the last work, we 
propose a three-stage auction-based framework for spectrum group-buying. 
As an individual user may not be from the same secondary networks with 
others and he can not afford a whole channel by his own, it is feasible to 
group them together and bid for the same channel. The framework takes into 
account users’ limited budgets and different evaluations of channels as 
well as fairness and efficiency.


Date:                   Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 4483
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:      Prof. Mounir Hamdi (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Qian Zhang (Supervisor)
                         Dr. Gary Chan (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen
 			Dr. Lin Gu


**** ALL are Welcome ****