Resource allocation techniques for heterogeneous networks under user misbehavior

©2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this letter we focus on the uplink offloading with IP Flow Mobility (IFOM). With IFOM a User Equipment (UE) is able to maintain concurrently two data streams, one through LTE and the other through WiFi. We consider the existence of malicious UEs that aim to exploit the WiFi bandwidth against their truthful peers, in order to upload less data through the energy demanding LTE uplink and a reputation based method is proposed to combat the selfish operation. The WiFi bandwidth is allocated based on weighted proportional fairness and the LTE rate is defined through an exponential pricing algorithm. We theoretically analyse our approach and evaluate the performance of the malicious and the truthful UEs in terms of energy efficiency and throughput, through simulations. We show that while the malicious UEs present better energy efficiency before being detected, their performance is significantly degraded with the proposed reaction method.Peer Reviewe