A resource characteristic and user QoS oriented bandwidth and power allocation algorithm for heterogeneous networks

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) composed of macrocells and small cells are expected to improve the transmission performance of users significantly. Designing efficient resource allocation schemes, specifically, bandwidth allocation and power allocation schemes for HetNets is of particular importance for it may affect user quality of service (QoS) and network performance severely. In this paper, we consider the resource allocation problem of a HetNet composed of a macrocell and a number of femtocells and propose a resource characteristic and user QoS oriented bandwidth and power allocation algorithm for the femto base stations (FBSs) which share spectrum with the macro base station. By taking into account the service requirements of the femto user equipments (FUEs) and the bandwidth resource characteristics of the network, various bandwidth resource allocation schemes are proposed. Particularly, in the case of slightly insufficient bandwidth resource, we propose a bankruptcy game based bandwidth resource allocation algorithm for the FBSs, and solve the bandwidth allocation problem by means of Shapley value method. To stress the tradeoff between data rate and power consumption, we examine the energy efficiency of the FBSs and formulate the power allocation problem as a multi-objective optimization problem with the objectives of maximizing the energy efficiency of all the FBSs. The optimal power allocation strategy can be obtained by solving the optimization problem via ideal point method and generic algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.