A distributed algorithm combining power control and scheduling for femtocell networks

In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm combining power control and scheduling for densely deployed femtocells networks. The strong interference in the downlink from the femtocells should be well mitigated to satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirement of femtocell users. The considered optimization problem is formulated as minimizing the total power consumption, while the QoS requirements of femtocell users are guaranteed. An optimal scheme requires global information of channel qualities, which is very difficult to put into practice. This paper proposed a suboptimal algorithm joining power control with scheduling policy, which is operated in distributed manner. The distributed algorithm provides a suboptimal solution using local information including the channel quality of users and the iterative power values. Simulation results prove that our proposed algorithm can effectively allocate power and frequency resource to the femtocell users, while achieve superior system performance in terms of outage ratio and scheduling fairness.