Scalable resource allocation for fair coexistence in heterogeneous networks

In LTE and LTE-Advanced small cells (i.e., femtocells) have shown great influence in ensuring higher quality of service (QoS). For 5G they will continue to play a vital role as well. In this paper we present an adaptive resource allocation (i.e., bandwidth and transmit power of femtocells) scheme which tries to mitigate the cross tier interference between femtocell and macrocell, ensuring overall fairness among cell centre and cell edge users. We propose a two player bargaining game between macrocell and femtocell for fair coexistence. Simulation results show that for macrocell users up to 80% data rate increase can be achieved at the cost of less than 10% data rate reduction for femto users. This reduction can be compensated with (5%–9%) increase in per user resource allocation. The effectiveness of our scheme comes from the fact that with minimum sectoring of the total coverage area and minimum partitioning of available radio resource we achieve optimal fairness around the network.