An Improved Resource Allocation Scheme for Heterogeneous Macro–Femto Networks

Abstract

The increasing demand for varied wireless applications urges the development of an efficient resource allocation mechanism that provides required rate satisfaction and interference mitigation. Femtocell deployment provides capacity and coverage improvement and service quality to indoor users. However, overlay deployment of femtocells makes resource and interference management a bit challenging. Thus, a review on the resource allocation strategies for heterogeneous macro–femto networks is conducted. A self-organized resource allocation (SO-RA) scheme was implemented to mitigate co-layer interference in the downlink transmission for a macro–femto networks. An analysis on the SO-RA scheme was conducted, considering the cross-layer interference between macrocell and femtocell. A modification to the system was proposed to mitigate the cross-layer interference by adjusting the transmit power of femto base station. The resulting modified scheme and the SO-RA scheme were compared with existing schemes like reuse-1 and simple macro network for various system parameters. The modified SO-RA scheme achieves the best performance among all the four schemes. It results in improved throughput, fairness performance, and interference mitigation compared with the SO-RA scheme.