Interference-aware downlink resource management for OFDMA femtocell networks

Femtocell is an economical solution to provide high speed indoor communication instead of the conventional macro-cellular networks. Especially, OFDMA femtocell is considered in the next generation cellular network such as 3GPP LTE and mobile WiMAX system. Although the femtocell has great advantages to accommodate indoor users, interference management problem is a critical issue to operate femtocell network. Existing OFDMA resource management algorithms only consider optimizing system-centric metric, and cannot manage the co-channel interference. Moreover, it is hard to cooperate with other femtocells to control the interference, since the self-configurable characteristics of femtocell. This paper proposes a novel interference-aware resource allocation algorithm for OFDMA femtocell networks. The proposed algorithm allocates resources according to a new objective function which reflects the effect of interference, and the heuristic algorithm is also introduced to reduce the complexity of the original problem. The Monte-Carlo simulation is performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm compared to the existing solutions.