Distributed Fair Resource Allocation for Cognitive Femtocell Networks

The emergence of femtocell and cognitive radio technology has led them to be considered promising solutions for improved wireless broadband access. The low-power and short-range femtocells equipped with cognitive functionality allow opportunistic access to the macro spectrum by sensing the wireless environment. A key role is to dynamically allocate available resources in the most efficient manner and manage the interference effectively. However, the issue of fair resource allocation is also an important problem to be addressed in cognitive femtocell networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed fair resource allocation scheme in a cognitive femtocell network while mitigating the inter-cell interference. The proposed distributed fair resource allocation (DFRA) algorithm guarantees fairness by applying channel state difference ranks and satisfaction degrees of femtocells. Additionally, the DFRA algorithm works in a fully distributed manner reducing the signal overhead compared to centralized schemes. Simulation results indicate that the proposed DFRA algorithm is able to significantly improve fairness among femtocells while maintaining considerable throughput performance.