Joint subchannel and power allocation in interference-limited OFDMA femtocells with heterogeneous QoS guarantee

In this paper, we consider the joint subchannel and power allocation problem in both the uplink and the downlink for two-tier networks comprising spectrum-sharing macrocells and femtocells. A joint subchannel and power allocation scheme for co-channel femtocells is proposed, aiming to maximize the capacity for delay-tolerant users subject to delay-sensitive users' quality of service and interference constraints imposed by macrocells. The joint subchannel and power allocation problem is modeled as an mixed integer programming problem, then transformed into a convex optimization problem by relaxing subchannel sharing, and finally solved by a dual decomposition approach. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by simulations and compared with existing scheme. © 2012 IEEE.