The design of resource management mechanism with hybrid access in a macro-femto system

In this paper, we study uplink resource management in a two-tier macro-femto heterogeneous system with hybrid access control. We consider a system where a macro base station (MBS) and a femto base station (FBS) together serve a number of mobile users. In this system, base stations and users make decisions in various resource management processes with different optimization objectives. Such decision making processes are usually correlated and an efficient mechanism is needed to coordinate the decision makers. We propose a four-stage resource management mechanism where access control, resource allocation (in both frequency and time domain) and power control are performed sequentially at the base stations and users, respectively. We formulate a resource management problem and find the optimal decisions for base stations and users. We show that this mechanism provides incentive for the FBS to operate in hybrid access mode. Simulation results show that the proposed resource management mechanism achieves a better performance than the mechanism with closed access.