Fairness guaranteed cooperative resource allocation in femtocell networks

User-deployed low-power femtocell access points (FAPs) can provide better indoor coverage and higher data rates than conventional cellular networks. However, a major problem in this uncoordinated frequency reuse scenario is the inter-cell interference. In this paper, we propose a graph based distributed algorithm called fairness guaranteed cooperative resource allocation (FGCRA) to manage interference among femtocells. Since the optimal resource allocation is a NP-hard problem, which is difficult to get global optimization in femtocell networks, our proposed FGCRA algorithm provides sub-optimal resource allocation via cooperation among interfering neighbors. First, we propose a specific fairness factor obtained from two-hop interference relations, to determine the lower bound amount of subchannels that each FAP can use and guarantee the fairness among femtocells. Second, we propose scalable rules for distributed resource allocation and the solution to avoid the conflicts among interfering neighbors. Simulation results show that our proposed FGCRA significantly enhances both average user throughput and cell edge user throughput, and provides better fairness.