Interference-Aware Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for OFDMA-Based Heterogeneous Networks With Incomplete Channel State Information

Heterogeneous wireless networks are considered as promising technologies to improve energy efficiency. In heterogeneous networks, interference management is very important since the interference due to spectrum sharing can significantly degrade overall performance. In the existing work, various resource allocation methods are proposed to either improve energy efficiency or mitigate interference in orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based multicell networks. To the best of our knowledge, no research on resource allocation has jointly considered improving energy efficiency and performing interference control, especially using interference power constraint strategies. Furthermore, most existing work assumes that all of the channel state information (CSI) is known completely, which might not be realistic in heterogeneous networks due to the limited capacity of the backhaul links and varied ownership of network devices. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretical scheme using energy-efficient resource allocation and interference pricing for an interference-limited environment in heterogeneous networks. We formulate the problems of resource allocation and interference management as a Stackelberg game with incomplete CSI. A backward induction method is used to analyze the proposed game. A closed-form expression of the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) is obtained for the proposed game with various interference power constraints. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.