Water-Filling Power Allocation Algorithm for Joint Utility Optimization in Femtocell Networks

The ongoing evolution of personal mobile devices capabilities and wireless technologies result in a huge growth of traffic on mobile networks (3G/4G). One of the most promising approaches to handle this data crisis is to offload the fast growing traffic onto femtocell networks. Since both the 3G/4G macrocell and femtocells operate on the same licensed spectrum, the cross-tier interference should be well managed. In this paper, we propose a utility-based transmission power allocation policy for the uplink transmission in femtocell networks. Our main motivation is to design the transmission power allocation policy aiming at optimizing the joint utility of femtocell users (FUs) subject to a interference temperature constraint at the macrocell base station (MBS) side. We provide a novel floating-ceiling water-filling (FCWF) algorithm with little computational overhead to obtain the optimal solution for the joint utility optimization problem. Numerical results confirm that the joint utility and average SINR can be significant improved with the proposed method.