Joint energy‐efficient resource allocation and interference alignment for HetNets

Abstract

In the area of interference management, many works have used interference alignment (IA) to tackle interference in heterogeneous networks (HetNets). However, few work has been done from the energy-efficiency (EE) aspect. In this study, the authors address the joint EE resource allocation and IA problem for HetNets where several femtocells underlay within the coverage of a macrocell, and take into account the service requirements of macro cell user (MU). A mixed integer and non-convex optimisation framework is adopted to investigate the EE maximisation problem which is a multi-dimensional resource management problem. To solve the problem, the authors propose a user scheduling scheme to determine the transmission sequence as well as encoding and decoding matrices for each user. Then an iterative power control algorithm is proposed to optimise the EE of the networks. Simulation results validate the convergence and performance of proposed scheme.