A distributed energy-efficient algorithm for resource allocation in downlink femtocell networks

Femtocells have attracted more and more attention in academia, industry and standardization forums. Besides, energy efficiency has been widely discussed in recent years. However, most of the existing works focus on the energy efficiency of macro base stations, the energy efficiency of femto base stations is neglected. In this paper, we study the maximization of energy efficiency of downlink OFDMA macro-femto networks. Both the transmit power constraint of femto base stations and the SINR thresholds of femto users and macro users are considered. We model the subchannel and power allocation problem as a non-cooperative game and a price function is introduced. To decrease the computational complexity, joint subchannel and power allocation are decomposed into two steps and a distributed resource allocation scheme is proposed to resolve the resource allocation problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance in terms of energy efficiency compared with equal power allocation and an energy-efficient power control algorithm.