Discrete bacterial foraging optimization for resource allocation in macrocell-femtocell networks

Femtocells are good examples of the ultimate networking technology, offering enhanced indoor coverage and higher data rate. However, the dense deployment of femto base stations (FBSs) and the exploitation of subcarrier reuse between macrocell base stations and FBSs result in significant co-tier and cross-tier interference, thus degrading system performance. Therefore, appropriate resource allocations are required to mitigate the interference. This paper proposes a discrete bacterial foraging optimization (DBFO) algorithm to find the optimal resource allocation in two-tier networks. The simulation results showed that DBFO outperforms the random-resource allocation and discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) considering the small number of steps taken by particles and bacteria.