Multi-objective Resource Allocation for LTE/LTE-A Femtocell/HeNB Networks Using Ant Colony Optimization

Existing femtocell resource allocation schemes for Long Term Evolution or LTE-Advanced femtocell networks do not jointly achieve efficient resource utilization, fairness guarantee, interference mitigation and reduced complexity in a satisfactory manner. In this paper, a multi-objective resource allocation scheme is proposed to achieve these desired features simultaneously. We first formulate three objective functions to respectively maximize resource utilization efficiency, guarantee a high degree of fairness and minimize interference. A weighted sum approach is then used to combine these objective functions to form a single multi-objective optimization problem. An ant colony optimization algorithm is employed to find the Pareto-optimal solution to this problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme performs jointly well in all aspects, namely resource utilization, fairness and interference mitigation. Additionally, it maintains satisfactory performance in the handover process and has a reasonably low complexity compared to the existing schemes.