Interference Coordination in Small Cell Networks Using Coalition Formation Game

Small cell networks (SCNs) have been presented as an efficient way to improve the capacity of wireless networks. However, dense deployment of small cell base stations (SBSs) can cause severe intra-tier interference which prevents the system from achieving high spectrum efficiency. Therefore, the investigation on interference coordination in SCNs is essential. In this paper, we formulate the interference coordination problem as a coalition formation game in characteristic form and a centralized coalition formation algorithm is introduced. The proposed algorithm is able to avoid the emergence of partition loop which will lead to the instability of the algorithm. Moreover, the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of convergence and stability is also investigated. Simulation results show that the proposed coalition formation algorithm yields significant gains, in aggregate spectrum efficiency, reaching up to 21.91% compared with non-cooperative case for a network of N = 13 SBSs.