Cognitive and Game-Theoretical Radio Resource Management for Autonomous Femtocells with QoS Guarantees

To successfully deploy femtocells overlaying the Macrocell as a two-tier that had been shown greatly benefiting communications quality in various manners, it requires to mitigate cross-tier interference between the Macrocell and femtocells, and intra-tier interference among femtocells, as well as to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. Existing solutions therefore assign orthogonal radio resources in frequency and spatial domains to each network, however, infeasible for dense femtocells deployments. It is also difficult to apply centralized resource managements facing challenges of scalability to the two-tier. Considering the infeasibility of imposing any modification on existing infrastructures, we leverage the cognitive radio technology to propose the cognitive radio resource management scheme for femtocells to mitigate cross-tier interference. Under such cognitive framework, a strategic game is further developed for the intra-tier interference mitigation. Through the concept of effective capacity, proposed radio resource management schemes are appropriately controlled to achieve required statistical delay guarantees while yielding an efficient radio resources utilization in femtocells. Performance evaluation results show that a considerable performance improvement can be generally achieved by our solution, as compared with that of state-of-the-art techniques, to facilitate the deployment of femtocells.