Self-Organizing Coalitions for Conflict Evaluation and Resolution in Femtocells

Abstract

The recent introduction of carrier aggregation in LTE-Advanced enables new possibilities in designing frequency domain interference reduction and management schemes. These methodologies are of extreme interest in the case of dense and uncoordinated deployments of femtocells. In such scenarios, dense deployment of cells coupled with the scarcity of frequency resources may lead to a potentially disruptive amount of interference, which severely affects the performance of the system. This contribution presents a novel method inspired by graph and coalitional game theories. The proposed algorithm consists of a set of distributed and scalable rules for building coalitions; these rules essentially resolve the conflicts among avid femtocells competing for a limited amount of resources. The proposed scheme has been designed by targeting localized reconfigurations, thus avoiding reconfiguration storms in the network. Furthermore, the rules governing the resource redistribution ensure overall system performance improvements while maintaining a certain degree of fairness among the competing nodes. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.