Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for Ultra-Dense Licensed and Unlicensed Dual-Access Small Cell Networks

In this study, an energy-efficient self-organized framework for sub-channel allocation and power allocation is presented for ultra-dense small cell networks, which can operate in both licensed and unlicensed bands. In order to protect legacy WiFi devices (operating in unlicensed bands), we consider the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) operation in unlicensed bands based on Carrier Sense Adaptive Transmission (CSAT), in which 'ON' and 'OFF' duty cycle approach is utilized. On the other hand, there are severe interference management problems among small cells (operating in licensed and unlicensed bands) and between macro cells and small cells (operating in licensed bands) due to co-channel and ultra-dense deployment of small cells. This article proposes a self-organized optimization framework for the allocation of sub-channels and power levels by exploiting a non-cooperative game with the objective to maximize the energy efficiency of dual-access small cells without creating harmful impact on coexisting network entities including macro cell users, small cell users, and legacy WiFi devices. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms (6 and 11 percent) and (8 and 18 percent) the round-robin and the spectrum-efficient schemes, respectively, for two different small cell scenarios. In addition, it is shown that for less channel state information (CSI) estimation errors ς = 0.02, the maximum performance degradation of the proposed scheme is reasonably small (5.5 percent) as compared to the perfect CSI.