Energy-Efficient Cooperative Transmission in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with QoS Constraint

Heterogeneous wireless network is an effective scheme to improve both the spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency of cellular system. However, interference limits the performance of such heterogeneous wireless network seriously. Hence cooperative decision making, i.e., cooperative transmission is necessary. In this paper, we develop an energy-efficient scheme for cooperative transmission in heterogeneous wireless networks with QoS constraint. Since too much signaling is needed for absolutely centralized cooperation, which is infeasible in practical system, partly cooperation is considered in this paper. We first formulate the problem as a two-stage Stackelberg game. In the first stage, an energy-efficient transmission scheme for macrocell users (MUE) is proposed based on the interference state of the MUEs. In the second stage, after obtaining the SINR and target SINR of the MUEs, the femtocell base stations update their beamformers and optimize the transmission power individually through a non-cooperative game, the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium is proved. Then an iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain the Stackelberg equilibrium. Simulation results show the performance gain of the proposed scheme.