Coalition based interference mitigation in femtocell networks with multi-resource allocation

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the interference mitigation in femtocell networks, where femtocell access points (FAPs) are allowed to cooperate as different cooperative groups to allocate resources. We model the femtocell cooperation characteristics as a coalition formation game in partition form with non-transferable utility. Furthermore, a distributed coalition formation algorithm is proposed to enable each FAP to decide to depart from or join in a coalition independently, moreover, we devise a low complex iterative algorithm to optimize the allocation of each coalition's multi-dimensional resources for maximizing its FAPs' payoffs. By applying our proposed coalition formation scheme, a Nash stable FAP partition is formed and FAPs in each coalition can effectively exploit the cooperative gain to mitigate the interference and maximize the sum rate. Numerical results are provided to corroborate our proposed studies.