Coalitional Game Theory for Cooperative Interference Management in Femtocell Networks

Dense deployment of femtocells can cause serious intra-tier interference in femtocell networks. In this paper, a new cooperative interference management approach which allows the femtocell user equipment (FUE) to merge into cooperative groups, that is, coalitions, for the uplink transmissions in a femtocell network is proposed, so as to reduce the intra-tier interference and improve the system performance. Taking into account the power cost for cooperation, we claim that all the FUEs are impossible to merge together, and we formulate the proposed cooperative problem as a coalitional game in partition form with an externality due to the interference between the formed coalitions. To get the solution, a novel distributed coalition formation algorithm that takes advantage of the characteristics of femtocell network and allows the FUEs to interact and individually decide on which coalitions to participate in is proposed. Furthermore, we analyze the convergence and stability of the proposed algorithm. Simulations are conducted to illustrate the behavior and the performance of the proposed coalition formation algorithm among FUEs. Results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the system performance with much lower complexity than some previously proposed coalition formation algorithms.