Price-based power control of femtocell networks: A Stackelberg game approach

Femtocell has shown great promise for providing intelligent indoor coverage as well as enhanced network capacity and has gained increasing popularity among both academia and industry. However, the random deployments of femtocells cause complicated network topology and intensified interference to current macrocell networks. In this paper, a price-based power control scheme using Stackelberg game (SG) is proposed to minimize the sum interference generated by the femtocell to the macrocell. As the leader in the SG, a network interference controller (NIC) manages to minimize the sum interference generated by the femtocells by pricing for their power consumptions while the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the femtocell users should also be guaranteed. An unique Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) is verified to exist this game and a distributed price and power update algorithm is further proposed to converge to the SE. Numerical results show that besides the improvements of power efficiency and fairness of the femtocell network, our algorithm reduces the sum interference suffered by the macrocell nearly 20dBm, compared with that obtained at the Nash equilibrium (NE) through non-cooperative games.