Distributed Subchannel and Power Allocation for OFDMA-Based Femtocell Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed joint subchannel and power allocation algorithm for the downlink of an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) mixed femtocell/macrocell network deployment. Specifically, the total throughput of all femtocell user equipments (FUEs) is maximized while the network capacity of an existing macrocell is always protected. To this end, we employ an iterative process in which subchannels and transmit powers of base stations (BS) are alternatively assigned and optimized at every step. For a fixed power allocation, we prove that the optimal policy is to give each subchannel to the user with the highest data rate, or equivalently the highest signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), on that subchannel. For any given subchannel assignment, we apply the difference-of-concave- functions (d.c.) approach and transform the highly nonconvex program into a sequence of convex power allocation subproblems. We show that the developed iterative scheme converges to an optimal point. Importantly, we implement the devised solution by a decentralized algorithm, wherein each BS computes the optimal subchannel and power allocation for its own servicing cell. Numerical results confirm the merits of our proposed approach.