Price-Based Power Allocation in Two-Tier Spectrum Sharing Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Attributable to the using of the same spectrum resources, heterogeneous cellular networks have serious interference problems, which greatly restricts the performance of the network. In this paper, the price-based power allocation for femtocells underlaying a macrocell heterogeneous cellular network is investigated. By exploiting interference pricing mechanism, we formulate the interference management problem as a Stackelberg game and make a joint utility optimization of macrocells and femtocells. Specially, the energy consumption of macrocell users and the transmission rate utility of femtocell users are considered in this utility optimization problem. In the game model, the macrocell base station is regarded as a leader, which coordinates the interference from femtocell users to the macrocell users by pricing the interference. On the other hand, the femtocell base stations are modelled as followers. The femtocell users obtain their power allocation by pricing. After proving the existence of the Stackelberg equilibrium, the non-uniform and uniform pricing schemes are proposed, and distributed interference pricing algorithm is proposed to address uniform interference price problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes are effective on interference management and power allocation.