Distributed resource allocation for femtocell interference coordination via power minimisation

This paper proposes a decentralized model for the allocation of modulation and coding schemes, subchannels and transmit power to users in OFDMA femtocell deployments. The proposed model does not rely on any exchanged information between cells, which is especially useful for femtocell networks. Coordination between femtocells is achieved through the intrinsic properties of minimising transmit power independently at each cell, which leads the network to self-organize into an efficient frequency reuse pattern. This paper also provides a two-level decomposition approach for solving this intricate resource assignment problem that is able to find optimal solutions at cell level in reduced periods of time. System-level simulations show a significant performance improvement in terms of user outages and network capacity when using the proposed distributed resource allocation in comparison with scheduling techniques based on uniform power distributions among subcarriers.