Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
465112 Physical Communication 2014 11 Pages PDF
Abstract

This paper deals with a heterogeneous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) network where a user-deployed low power femtocell operates in the coverage area of a traditional macro-cell using the same frequency band. Femtocells represent a promising solution to increase the network capacity in next-generation wireless networks. However, the arising interference must be mitigated by means of suitable resource allocation policies. In particular, an OFDMA system allows a flexible usage of the resources that are organized in Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs). This flexibility can be fully exploited in a heterogeneous network if the femtocell base station knows how the PRBs are organized and grouped. This paper considers a cognitive femtocell base station that is able to sense the environment and identify the set of PRBs allocated to a given user by the macro-cell base station. A PRBs clustering method is proposed here. Initially, suitable inputs are derived and then provided to the KK-means algorithm for a clustering refinement. The method proposed here is able to correctly gather together the PRBs of each user. Performance comparisons with a hierarchical clustering method is presented. The benefits of PRBs clustering on direction of arrival estimation are shown in order to prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Computer Networks and Communications
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