An Operations Research Game Approach for Resource and Power Allocation in Cooperative Femtocell Networks

Femtocells are 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 raise several challenging questions: how much a femtocell can demand? how much it can obtain? and how this shall depends on the interference with its neighbors? Strategic interference management between femtocells via power control and resource allocation mechanisms is needed to avoid performance degradation during congestion cases. In this paper, 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. Based on these evaluations, users' demands are first rescaled to strategically justified values. Then, a power-level and throughput optimization using the rescaled demands is conducted. 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, spectrum spatial reuse, and transmit power, with a slightly higher time complexity compared to alternative solutions.