Self-Organizing Coalitions for Conflict Evaluation and Resolution in Femtocells

The recent introduction of carrier aggregation in
LTE-Advanced enables new possibilities in designing frequency
domain interference reduction and management schemes. These
methodologies are of extreme interest in the case of dense
and uncoordinated deployments of femtocells. In such scenarios,
dense deployment of cells coupled with the scarcity of frequency
resources may lead to a potentially disruptive amount of interference,
which severely affects the performance of the system.
This contribution presents a novel method inspired by graph and
coalitional game theories. The proposed algorithm consists of a
set of distributed and scalable rules for building coalitions; these
rules essentially resolve the conflicts among avid femtocells competing
for a limited amount of resources. The proposed scheme
has been designed by targeting localized reconfigurations, thus
avoiding reconfiguration storms in the network. Furthermore, the
rules governing the resource redistribution ensure overall system
performance improvements while maintaining a certain degree
of fairness among the competing nodes. Simulation results prove
the effectiveness of the proposed method.