A distributed coalition formation scheme for interference management in dense small cell networks

Todays wireless networks are mostly dominated by multimedia content, which poses much pressure on the macrocell networks. In such a case, underlaid small cells deployment is considered promising to off-load the traffic from the overburdened macrocell network and meet the applications' quality of service (QoS). However, the interference management among dense deployment of small cells remains a technical challenge. To address this issue, a neighborhood cooperation based interference mitigation scheme is proposed in this paper. By forming coalitions, small cell access points (SAPs) are able to mitigate co-tier interference within a coalition and thus improve their achievable data rates. The cooperative behavior among the neighborhood SAPs is formulated as a coalition game in partition form with externalities. To achieve a final stable coalition structure in the recursive core, a distributed algorithm based on merge with partial reversibility rule is introduced and its performance is theoretically analyzed. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can substantially improve the individual SAP throughput and system payoff as well when compared to the classical scheme and non-cooperative case.