A Coalition Formation Game for Remote Radio Head Cooperation in Cloud Radio Access Network
Abstract: With the increasing demand of spectrum and emergence of mobile devices, a cloud radio access network (C (C-RAN) RAN) is a promising technology to improve network capacity and coverage. The key concept of the C C-RAN RAN is to separate the radio function unit in remote radio adio heads (RRHs) from the digital function unit in baseband units (BBUs). This separation facilitates efficient spectrum and infrastructure sharing in the C C-RAN. RAN. This paper considers the cooperative interference management among RRHs in the C C-RAN. RAN. The RRHs RRH can form coalitions to mitigate intra intra-interference interference and jointly serve their subscribers. To characterize RRH performance under the coalition, this paper develops two signal-to-interference-plus-noise noise-ratio (SINR)-based based downlink throughput models of RRH, where here one adopts tools from stochastic geometry to capture the interference from vehicular users (VUs) belonging to noncooperative RRHs, and another ignores the VU interference. In this paper, a coalition formation game is formulated to model the situation in which RRHs of C-RAN RAN can make an individual decision to cooperatively serve their VUs if the throughput of the RRH can be improved. To obtain the solution of the proposed game, we develop a distributed coalition formation algorithm and analyze the stabil stability ity of the coalition structure using a Markov chain model. Simulation results show that, as compared with the noncoalition and grand coalition, our distributed coalition formation can improve