Joint frequency and time resource partitioning for OFDM-based small cell networks

This paper investigates the problem of distributed joint channel and time slot selection for interference mitigation in the multiple microcells system, where each microcell user determines which channel it should occupy and when it should get access to the serving microcell base station. Considering the characteristics of local interference, a distributed inter-cell time–frequency resource scheduling scheme is proposed, where neighboring users can get access to the same channel at different time slots or different channels at the same time slot. Then, a game is formulated to model the problem, in which the utility function of a individual user is the number of neighboring users occupying the same channel at the same time slot. It is proved to be an exact potential game with at least one pure strategy Nash Equilibrium (NE) point. Moreover, in order to achieve global interference minimization via local information, we propose the Heterogeneous Independent Revision Process (HIRP) to obtain the NE, which allows all users to update their selections simultaneously. Finally, numerical results show that our proposed HIRP guarantees that the interference minimization game converges to the NE and the proposed scheme acquires better performance compared with other existing interference management scheme.