Potential Game Approach for Self-Organized Interference Management in Closed Access Femtocell Networks

This paper proposes a game-theoretic approach for self-organized resource allocation in OFDMA femtocells with closed access configuration. The objective of the proposed scheme is to overcome the interference problem caused by co-channel operation of femtocells in an existing macrocell network using a self-organization capability of femto users. Inspired by the emerging cognitive radio technology, each femto user acts as an autonomous entity and attempts to select the most appropriate subset of resource blocks in a decentralized manner in order to mitigate the cross- and co-tier interference. Such a self-organized resource allocation scheme can be modeled as a potential game, which guarantees the convergence to a Nash equilibrium as long as distributed sequential play based on the best response strategy is adopted. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the capacity of the femtocell network, while minimizing the performance degradation of the macrocell network.