Resource Allocation for Cognitive Radio-Enabled Femtocell Networks With Imperfect Spectrum Sensing and Channel Uncertainty

Abstract

Deploying femtocells underlaying macrocells is a promising way to improve the capacity and enhance the coverage of cellular systems. However, such a two-tier network also gives rise to a cross-tier and intratier interference issue that should be properly addressed to acquire the potential performance gain. In this paper, we study the resource-allocation (RA) problem in a two-tier orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) access-based heterogeneous cellular network, where the femtocells that employ a closed access strategy are equipped with a cognitive radio (CR) function to identify radio environment so that they can share subchannels with the macrocells without generating excessive interference to the macrocell users (MUs), which fall into the coverage of the femtocells. We formulate an optimization task to maximize the sum throughput of the femtocell users (FUs) under the consideration of imperfect spectrum sensing and channel uncertainty while controlling the interference to the MUs below their bearable thresholds in the sense of probability. We introduce a conservative convex approximation to the formulated problem and develop a fast algorithm to solve it by exploiting its structure. Simulation results show that our proposal can improve the throughput of the FUs with almost no changes in the infrastructure of the cellular network.