Balancing of the Quality-of-Service, Energy and Revenue of Base Stations in Wireless Networks via Tullock Contests

In order to provide high-quality services, wireless network providers deploy a large number of base stations per unit area and maintain these base stations operating over a long period of time invariably. This situation resulted in tremendous energy waste and economic cost to service providers. Owing to the conflict between energy consumption and economic benefits, simply reducing energy consumption may cut the profits of network providers. In order to effectively balance the Quality-of-Service (QoS), energy consumption, and profits of wireless networks, we propose a new sleeping scheme for base stations by using Tullock Contest. In the proposed game-theoretical framework, each player is a base station which competes for service revenue by providing services while consuming energy. The stations are classified into two categories, running mode and sleeping mode. The eventual sleeping strategy can be obtained by applying Nash equilibrium. The proposed scheme adjusts the number of sleeping stations to balance the energy consumption and profits of wireless network providers with the premise of ensuring user QoS. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated and compared under different system configurations and user traffic patterns.