Distributed Uplink Power Control for Two-Tier Femtocell Networks via Convex Pricing

Interference management is one of the most important issues in two-tier femtocell networks in which a central macrocell underlaid with several femtocell hotspots. To address the cross-tier and co-tier interference, this paper introduces an energy-efficient power control algorithm via convex pricing scheme, where both circuit and transmit power have been considered. To achieve the target SINR, the macrocell protects itself by actively adapting its interference cap on the total interference they are willing to tolerate and pricing the interference from the femtocell user equipments (FUEs), while the FUE is to maximize its own throughput and keep the fairness with the other FUEs. Then, the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium for the proposed scheme are studied. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve energy efficiency of femtocell networks and mitigate the cross-and co-tier interference significantly while guaranteeing the minimum QoS requirement of macrocell users.