138 research outputs found
Coalitional Games with Overlapping Coalitions for Interference Management in Small Cell Networks
In this paper, we study the problem of cooperative interference management in
an OFDMA two-tier small cell network. In particular, we propose a novel
approach for allowing the small cells to cooperate, so as to optimize their
sum-rate, while cooperatively satisfying their maximum transmit power
constraints. Unlike existing work which assumes that only disjoint groups of
cooperative small cells can emerge, we formulate the small cells' cooperation
problem as a coalition formation game with overlapping coalitions. In this
game, each small cell base station can choose to participate in one or more
cooperative groups (or coalitions) simultaneously, so as to optimize the
tradeoff between the benefits and costs associated with cooperation. We study
the properties of the proposed overlapping coalition formation game and we show
that it exhibits negative externalities due to interference. Then, we propose a
novel decentralized algorithm that allows the small cell base stations to
interact and self-organize into a stable overlapping coalitional structure.
Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm results in a notable
performance advantage in terms of the total system sum-rate, relative to the
noncooperative case and the classical algorithms for coalitional games with
non-overlapping coalitions
Partially-Distributed Resource Allocation in Small-Cell Networks
We propose a four-stage hierarchical resource allocation scheme for the
downlink of a large-scale small-cell network in the context of orthogonal
frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). Since interference limits the
capabilities of such networks, resource allocation and interference management
are crucial. However, obtaining the globally optimum resource allocation is
exponentially complex and mathematically intractable. Here, we develop a
partially decentralized algorithm to obtain an effective solution. The three
major advantages of our work are: 1) as opposed to a fixed resource allocation,
we consider load demand at each access point (AP) when allocating spectrum; 2)
to prevent overloaded APs, our scheme is dynamic in the sense that as the users
move from one AP to the other, so do the allocated resources, if necessary, and
such considerations generally result in huge computational complexity, which
brings us to the third advantage: 3) we tackle complexity by introducing a
hierarchical scheme comprising four phases: user association, load estimation,
interference management via graph coloring, and scheduling. We provide
mathematical analysis for the first three steps modeling the user and AP
locations as Poisson point processes. Finally, we provide results of numerical
simulations to illustrate the efficacy of our scheme.Comment: Accepted on May 15, 2014 for publication in the IEEE Transactions on
Wireless Communication
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