Demands rescaling for resource and power allocation in cooperative femtocell networks

Femtocell provisioning is emerging as a key technology to improve coverage and network capacity in indoor environments. When femtocells use different frequency bands than macrocells (i.e., split-spectrum approach), femto-to-femto interference remains the major issue. In particular, congestion cases in which femtocell demands exceed the available resources pose an important challenge. In this paper, we propose a joint resource and power allocation strategy for the management of interference in cooperative femtocell networks. We model the resource and power allocation problem as an operations research game, where imputations are deduced from cooperative game theory, namely the Shapley value and the Nucleolus, using utility components results of partial optimizations. The performance of the developed solutions is analyzed and extensive simulation results are presented to illustrate their potential advantages. In particular, we show that the Shapley value solution with power control offers the overall best performance in terms of throughput, fairness, and transmit power, compared to alternative solutions.