Three-state fuzzy logic method on resource allocation for small cell networks

Abstract

This research addresses the issue of resource and power allocation in small cell networks, and focuses on two aspects: i) the interference coordination among cells; and ii) the resource allocation among the users served by the same cell. Due to the density of small cells, centralised interference coordination schemes require an enormous level of communication among cells. Fuzzy logic (FL) is a promising low-complexity approach to realise autonomous interference coordination that does not need communication between cells. In this paper, we propose a novel FL method and associated decision-making algorithm for tackling resource allocation in small cell networks. Unlike the traditional FL method using the values of two states ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to describe how much a resource block (RB) should or should not be allocated, the proposed method employs a 3-state criterion that distinguishes high-quality RBs from medium-quality RBs. Also, the issue of allocating the RBs of a single cell to multiple users is studied in the FL method. Simulation results show that the proposed method can notably improve the performance of the traditional FL method in terms of both throughput and user satisfaction, without requiring extra processing power.