Power control of femtocell networks based on Stackelberg game

As an encouraging solution to provide intelligent indoor wireless coverage and enhanced network capacity, femtocell has drawn considerable attention from both academia and industry. However, the random deployments of these autonomous devices has complicated the current network topology and thus will lead to intensified interference to the in-use macrocell networks. In this paper, we propose a Stackelberg game (SG)-based power control scheme to impose regulation on these noncooperative femtocells. Specifically, a network power controller (NPC) is assumed as the leader of the SG and the femtocells it connects to play as the followers. By pricing for the femtocells power consumption, the NPC tries to minimize the transmit power of the femtocell network under both the quality of service (QoS) constrains at femtocell terminals and the sum interference constrain at the macrocell terminals. We prove that an unique Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) exists in this game and a distributed algorithm that converges to the SE is further proposed. Numerical results show that besides the fast convergence property, our algorithm greatly reduces the transmit power of femtocells and therefore, improves the power efficiency of the femtocell network as much as 10 times, compared with that of the pure non-cooperative game scheme.