Opportunistic Spectrum Reuse for Femtocell Networks

Femtocell networks are inherently interference- limited similar to other cellular networks. However, massive and unplanned roll-outs of femtocells make the classical macro cells more susceptible to the resulting interference. In this paper a novel distributed approach is proposed for resource allocation for femtocells that opportunistically identifies low-cost resources (in terms of interference) in a way that would cause minimal impact on the service level of primary macro users. Simulation study confirms the efficiency of proposed algorithm compared to benchmarking scenario of macro-only network operation. As it is shown, the proposed method enables flexible tuning of femto throughput at the cost of macro users service.