Clustering-based interference management in densely deployed femtocell networks

Deploying femtocells underlaying macrocells is a promising way to improve the capacity and enhance the coverage of a cellular system. However, densely deployed femtocells in urban area also give rise to intra-tier interference and cross-tier issue that should be addressed properly in order to acquire the expected performance gain. In this paper, we propose an interference management scheme based on joint clustering and resource allocation for two-tier Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)-based femtocell networks. We formulate an optimization task with the objective of maximizing the sum throughput of the femtocell users (FUs) under the consideration of intra-tier interference mitigation, while controlling the interference to the macrocell user (MU) under its bearable threshold. The formulation problem is addressed by a two-stage procedure: femtocells clustering and resource allocation. First, disjoint femtocell clusters with dynamic sizes and numbers are generated to minimize intra-tier interference. Then each cluster is taken as a resource allocation unit to share all subchannels, followed by a fast algorithm to distribute power among these subchannels. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes can improve the throughput of the FUs with acceptable complexity.