Self-organized Spectrum Access in Small-cell Networks with Dynamic Loads

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of co-tier interference mitigation for dynamic small- cell networks, in which the load of each small-cell varies with the number of active associated small-cell users (SUs). Due to the fact that most small-cell base stations (SBSs) are deployed in an ad-hoc manner, the problem of reducing co-tier interference caused by dynamic loads in a distributed fashion is quite challenging. First, we propose a new distributed channel allocation method for small-cells with dynamic loads and define a dynamic interference graph. Based on this approach, we formulate the problem as a dynamic interference graph game and prove that the game is a potential game and has at least one pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE) point. Moreover, we show that the best pure strategy NE point minimizes the expectation of the aggregate dynamic co-tier interference in the small-cell network. A distributed dynamic learning algorithm is then designed to achieve NE of the game, in which each SBS is unaware of the probability distributions of its own and other SBSs’ dynamic loads. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can mitigate dynamic co-tier interference effectively and significantly outperform random channel selection.