Power Minimization Based Resource Allocation for Interference Mitigation in OFDMA Femtocell Networks

Abstract

With the introduction of femtocells, cellular networks are moving from the conventional centralized network architecture to a distributed one, where each network cell should make its own radio resource allocation decisions, while providing inter-cell interference mitigation. However, realizing such distributed network architecture is not a trivial task. In this paper, we first introduce a simple self-organization rule, based on minimizing cell transmit power, following which a distributed cellular network is able to converge into an efficient resource reuse pattern. Based on such self-organization rule and taking realistic resource allocation constraints into account, we also propose two novel resource allocation algorithms, being autonomous and coordinated, respectively. Performance of the proposed self-organization rule and resource allocation algorithms are evaluated using system-level simulations, and show that power efficiency is not necessarily in conflict with capacity improvements at the network level. The proposed resource allocation algorithms provide significant performance improvements in terms of user outages and network capacity over cutting-edge resource allocation algorithms proposed in the literature.