Downlink cross-tier interference pricing and power control in OFDMA HetNets

Abstract

Deploying smallcell networks achieves great spatial reuse at the cost of severe cross-tier interference from concurrent transmission. This paper addresses the downlink cross-tier interference pricing and power control for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) heterogeneous Networks (HetNets), where a macrocell underlaid with several femtocells.We assume that the macrocell protects its transmission by pricing the interference on each orthogonal subchannel and each femtocell base station (FBS) determines the power allocation strategy accordingly.Then, a Stackelberg game is used to formulate the mentioned model. Existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) are analyzed. In addition, a distributed interference pricing and power update algorithm (DIPPU) with guaranteed convergency is proposed to achieve the SE. Simulation results validate the proposed algorithm and show its fast convergence. Due to the non-cooperative manner, the proposed scheme can approach the cooperative scheme in terms of capacity of femtocells with reduced communication overhead effectively.