The small cell is treated as a promising proposition to provide hot spot capacity and higher data rates. However, even with dense small cell deployment scenario, the heavy traffic load pressure and low energy efficiency in the small cell heterogeneous network (HetNet) still exist. Therefore, how to make the best use of densely deployed small cells under HetNet environments becomes the focus of researches. Offloading provides a feasible solution to promote cooperation between macrocells and small cells for user traffic supporting. In this paper, we propose the reverse auction based Green Offloading (GO) scheme for energy efficiency improvements. The proposed GO scheme employs the reverse auction theory to handle the offloading decision process, aiming at maximizing the system energy efficiency under the constraints of user Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, bandwidth, and transmission power limitations. Moreover, the reverse auction model gives the facility of multicell coordination transmissions with multiple winners situation. The energy efficiency optimization problem with constraints is solved by Dynamic Programming method with Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. The Individual Rationality and Truthfulness of the reverse auction model are also proved. By comparing the energy efficiency performances of the proposed GO scheme with current works within the Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) system downlink scenario, simulation results show the improvements of the proposed GO scheme.
A Multi-Attribute Reverse Auction Model on Margin Bidding