Dynamic Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Radio Femtocell Networks

Femtocell is envisioned as a highly promising solution to tackle the communications in the indoor environments, which has been a very challenging problem for mobile network operators. Currently, the spectrum allocated to femtocells is from the same licensed spectrum of macrocells, and the same mobile network operator. In this case, the capacity of femtocell networks may be largely limited due to the finite number of licensed spectrum bands and also the interference with other femtocells and macrocells. In this paper, we propose a radically new communications paradigm by incorporating cognitive radio in femtocell networks (COGFEM). In COGFEM, the cognitive radio enabled femtocells are able to access licensed spectrum bands not only from macrocells but also from other licensed systems (e.g. TV systems). Thus, the co-channel interference in femtocells can be greatly reduced and the network capacity can be significantly improved. We formulate a joint channel allocation and power control problem in COGFEM, and present two intelligent algorithms for efficient spectrum sharing in COGFEM. Results indicate that COGFEM is able to achieve much higher capacity than the femtocell networks which does not employ agile spectrum access.