1

A Joint Power and Subchannel Allocation Scheme Maximizing

System Capacity in Dense Femtocell Downlink Systems
JuYeop Kim and Dong-Ho Cho
the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST),
Daejeon, 305-701, Republic of Korea
E-mail : jykim@comis.kaist.ac.kr, dhcho@ee.kaist.ac.kr

Abstract Femtocell system is expected to bring significant

improvement of system performance with low cost. However,
when a number of femto BSs are installed by users without
cell-planning, the femtocell system will be in dense environment,
in which many femto co-cells exist in a small region and a
great portion of the femto cell is overlapped by other femto
cells. Femtocell system in dense environment is exposed to
strong inter-cell interference problem which is critical to system
capacity. In this paper, we derive a joint power and subchannel
allocation scheme in dense environment. The simulation and
numerical results show that our proposed scheme simply finds
a better solution compared to the conventional scheme in dense
environment.

I. I NTRODUCTION

OBILE communication system has been evolving to

improve 3Cs; Capacity, Coverage, and Cost. In this
circumstance, many recent researches focus on integrating
femtocell concept into mobile communication system. Since
service providers consider users-deploying scenario, in which
each user buys a femto BS and deploys it in his space, the
femtocell system will be likely to be in dense environment, in
which many femto cells exist in a small region and a great
portion of a femto cell is overlapped by other femto cells. As
a result, the femtocell system in dense environment faces a
strong inter-cell interference problem.
Radio Resource Management (RRM) is a key concept for
mitigating the strong interference problem. There are two
types of RRM; centralized and distributed RRM. In case
of centralized RRM, a center node manages radio resource
of multiple cells, but in case of distributed RRM, each
Base Station (BS) manages radio resource in its cell with
limited information about radio resource of neighbor cells.
Although the distributed RRM is simpler and more practical
to be implemented, the centralized RRM is more powerful
for optimizing system performance. In addition, the central
RRM can be practically implemented nowadays, since recent
standard, such as 3GPP, considers Coordinated Multi-Point
transmission/reception (CoMP), which can be categorized as
centralized RRM.
There are many research works with respect to the centralized RRM. Recent research works focus on Dynamic Spectrum
Management (DSM) which performs dynamic management
This work was supported by the IT R&D program of MKE/IITA [2008-F004-01, 5G mobile communication systems based on beam division multiple
access and relays with group cooperation].

978-1-4244-5213-4/09/ $26.00 2009 IEEE

1381

of spectrum resource based on instantaneous channel state.

The early works with respect to DSM aim to improve link
capacity in Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) environment. [1][4] Iterative Water-Filling(IWF) scheme, which iteratively
allocates power sub-optimally with considering interference
from other transmitter, was originally proposed and then
Modified IWF (M-IWF) scheme was proposed for improving
capacity with existence of crosstalk. Recently, some works
try to mitigate inter-cell interference in wireless network with
this DSM approach. Improved IWF (I-IWF) scheme which
includes subchannel allocation to Mobile Stations (MSs) in a
cell proposed in [5].
In this paper, we focus on the centralized RRM for improving performance of the femtocell system in dense environment.
Unlike general mobile communication system, mitigating of
strong interference is a key issue in dense femtocell system. In
addition, unlike other conventional DSM schemes, we design
a novel and practical resource management scheme which is
suitable for dense femtocell system based on characteristics
of dense environment. There are some works which deal
power control issue in femtocell system, ( [6], [7]) but none
of them assume dense environment with existence of strong
interference.
Notation: |X| denotes the number of elements in set X, and
(x)+ denotes x if x > 0 or 0 otherwise.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
We consider a dense femtocell system located in a macro
cell. For simplicity, we only consider femto cells and regard
the interference signal from macro BSs as Additive White
Gaussian Noise(AWGN). (BS further denotes femto BS.) Let
N and K be the set of indices of MSs and BSs, respectively,
and N = |N| and K = |K|. Also, we assume that there exists
a central node which has connectivity with BSs and can share
information with them. The central node makes a decision of
resource allocation, and the BSs manage resource according
to the decision of the central node.
Let S be the set of indices of subchannels in Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiple Access(OFDMA) system and
|S| = S. Let hijk be the channel gain of wireless link
between MS i and BS k at subchannel j. We assume that
the channel state is known to BSs by either channel feedback
from MSs or channel sounding process which is based on
channel reciprocity. In addition, we assume that hijk follows
independent Rayleigh fading distribution.

Snapshot of Power Allocation

A. Radio Resource Management Problem

user 1

0.5

PDL : max C(p, )

p,
   [k]
s.t. C(p, ) =
ij log2 (1 + ijk )

(1)
(2)

kK iN jS

ijk =


2 +

(3)

k K

(4)

i N, j S, k K

(5)

jS
[k]

p 0, ij {0, 1},

where Pt is the maximal transmission power of a BS and

ijk is SINR of the wireless link between MS i and BS
k at subchannel j. Note that this problem is a non-convex
optimization problem which is hard to be directly solved.
III. S UBCHANNEL AND P OWER A LLOCATION IN D ENSE
F EMTOCELL S YSTEM
We firstly derive optimal power allocation in case that is
given.
A. Power Allocation
By relaxing the constraint in (4), dual problem is derived
as following,
min g()
0

(6)

where = (1 , 2 , ..., K ), k is the Lagrangean multiplier

with respect to BS k and
(7)
g() = max L(, p)
p0


 
log2 (1+i[jk] jk )k (Pt
pjk ) , (8)
L(, p) =

kK

jS

10

11

12

10

11

12

10

11

12

10

11

12

10

11

12

user 2
0
user 3

0.5

0
user 4

0.5

0
0.5

6
7
Subchannel index

Fig. 1. Example of solution by the M-IWF scheme in dense femtocell system

Ijk =

pjk hi[jk] jk

(10)

pjk hi[jk ] jk

1
h [jk ] .
ln 2(1 + i[jk ] jk ) ( 2 + Ijk )2 i jk

(11)

k =k

p h
 jk ijk
k =k pjk hijk

pjk Pt ,

0
0.5

user 5

The objective of radio resource management problem is

to maximize system capacity, which is the sum of capacity
of all links. This problem can be divided into subchannel
allocation and power allocation sub-problems. Let =
([1] , [2] , ...[K] ) and [k] RN S be the vector of indication
variables for subchannel allocation with respect to BS k. Let
p = (p1 , p2 , ..., pK ) and pk RS be the vector of variables
indicating downlink transmission power level of BS k. Solving
the sub-problems are to decide and p. The downlink radio
resource management problem is formulated as following,

jS

[k]

where i[jk] = arg maxi ij . By taking derivative of (8) with

respect to pjk , the first-order derivative condition is derived as
following,
L(, p)
1/ ln 2
= 2
k tjk = 0,
pjk
( + Ijk )/hi[jk] jk +pjk

(9)

where tjk and Ijk are taxation and interference terms, respectively, and are expressed as following

1382

tjk =

k =k

From (9), the optimal power level pjk should satisfy the
condition that

+
1
2 + Ijk

.
(12)
pjk =
ln 2(k + tjk )
hi[jk] jk
Note that (12) is the same as the criterion in [4]. Thus, like
the M-IWF scheme proposed in [4], by updating p based
on (12) in each iteration and performing several iterations,
p will be converged to a local optimum. However, when the
M-IWF scheme is applied in dense environment, the power
is converged to a local optimum in a certain typical form in
most cases. Fig. 1 shows an example of power level by the MIWF scheme in dense environment. From the observation of
the simulation results, this typical form can be characterized
as following,
Only one BS loads power on some subchannels.
Multiple BSs load significantly small power on some
subchannels.
To justify this behavior mathematically, we make some
definitions as following.
Definition 1: In p, subchannel j is Binary Power Allocated(BPA) if pjk > 0 for some k and pjk = 0, k  = k,
and is non-BPA otherwise. In addition, Sb (p) and Sn (p) are
the set of BPA and non-BPA subchannels in p, respectively,
and Nk (p) is the number of BPA subchannels BS k loads
power.
Definition 2: p is a BPA solution, or in form of BPA, if
|Sb (p)| = S.
From the simulation results, we mathematically characterize
the typical power allocation, as following.
Observation 1: If p is a solution by the M-IWF scheme,
then it satisfies following,
pjb k  pjn k , jb Sb (p), jn Sn (p), k, k K.
This is due to the large taxation values. Since channel gain
from BS k to any MSs in other cell is generally high, small

amount of transmission power causes great interference to the

MSs in other cells. Thus, tjk becomes large at the convergent
point in the M-IWF scheme. With this characteristics, following lemmas can be derived.

Pt
, if pjk > 0,
Nk (p)
= 0,
otherwise.

pjk 

pj  k =

j  S


j  S

pj  k +

b (p)

pj  k =

j  Sb (p)

j  Sb (p)

(14)

pj  k

(15)

b (p)

2
1

k hi[j  k] j  k

Thus, k =

and pjk =

Pt
,
=
Nk(p)+1
pjk = 0,

24

(16)
(17)

Pt
Nk (p) .

j  Sb (p)

20

17
20

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

60

65

70

75

80

Room size (m)

Fig. 3.

E[Cl ] and E[Cr ] vs. room size

j {j Sb (p)|pj  k > 0} {j} (18)

k = k ,

(19)

 
K


pj  k hi[j  k ] j  k
log2 1 + i[jk] jk (22)

k=1

K




Pt hi[jk ] jk
log2 1 + i[jk] jk

2
(Nk (p) + 1)
k=1





Pt hi[j k ] j  k 2 Nk (p)
+
log2
2 (Nk (p)+1) Pt hi[j  k ] j  k


= log2

21



d(p, j) 



pj  k hi[j  k ] j  k
pjk hi[jk ] jk
log2
+log
(21)
2
2
2
log2

22

18

k=1

j  Sb (p)

23

19

1
k

and the rest of power levels are equal to those in p, where

h [jk] jk
k = arg maxk Nki (p)+1
. It simply means to make non-BPA
subchannel j in p into a BPA subchannel. Then, d(p, j), the
difference between capacity of p and p , can be derived as
following,


Pt hi[jk ] jk
d(p, j) = log2
2 (Nk (p) + 1)


K



Nk (p)
log2 1 + i[jk] jk Nk (p) log2

(20)
Nk (p) + 1
Proof:


E[Cl] (3 users)
E[Cl] (6 users)
E[Cl] (8 users)
E[Cr] (3 users)
E[Cr] (6 users)
E[Cr] (8 users)

25

Lemma 2: Let p be a solution of the M-IWF scheme, and

p be a BPA subchannelized solution of p with respect to
j Sn (p), which is defined as following,
pj  k

The topology used in the simulation

26

Nk (p)

= Pt .
k
Nk (p)
Pt ,

Fig. 2.

j  S

(13)

Capacity (bit/s/Hz)

Proof:


Lemma 1: If subchannel j is BPA subchannel, then j

Sb (p),

j Sb (p)

Since (24) is equal to Nk (p) log2

Nk (p)
Nk (p)+1

(23)

Proposition 1: Allocating power optimally in form of BPA

is more profitable than allocating power by the M-IWF scheme
if for a certain non-BPA subchannel j
K




E
log2 1 + i[jk] jk
 k=1

< E max log2 1 +

k

Pt hi[jk] jk
2 (Nk (p) + 1)


,

(25)

S
).
where = S log2 ( S+1
Proof: Assume that (25) is true. This implies that
n
E[d(p, j)|j Sn (p)] > 0, because n log2 ( n+1
) < for
any n < S . Let Sn (p) = {j1 , j2 , ...jNn }, p[a] be a BPA
subchannelized solution of p[a1] with respect to ja , and
p[0] = p. Then,
[Nn ]

E[C(p

) C(p)] = E[

Nn


d(p[a1] , ja )].

(26)

a=1

Since p[a] can be the typical power allocation by the M-IWF

scheme for all a,
E[

Nn


d(p[a1] , ja )] = E[Nn ]E[d(p, j)|j Sn (p)] > 0 (27)

a=1

(24)


, (20) holds.

Using this lemmas, following proposition can be derived.

1383

This implies that E[C(p[Nn ] )] > E[C(p)] and that an

optimal BPA solutions out-performs the solution by the MIWF scheme.
To check if the condition in proposition 1 holds in dense
environment, we conduct a simulation, whose topology is
shown in Fig. 2. Here, E[Cl ] and E[Cr ] indicate lefthand and

righthand term in (25). The simulation results in Fig. 3 show

that when the number of users are at most 8 and room size
is at most 72m, (which can be typical dense environment) the
condition in (25) holds.
Summing up, following theorem can be obtained.
Theorem 1: In dense environment, if the condition in
proposition 1 is satisfied, then system capacity of an optimal
BPA solution is higher than that of any solution by the M-IWF
scheme.
B. Subchannel Allocation
If power is assumed to be allocated in BPA form, subchannel allocation problem can be divided into two simple
problems; decision of the best BS to transmit and the best MS
i to receive for each subchannel. Following theorem gives a
guideline to solve above problems. We let Sk be the set of
MSs served by BS k and simplify Nk (p) as Nk .
[k ]

Theorem 2: For subchannel j, it is optimal to set i j to

jk
1 and otherwise set to 0, where ijk = arg maxiSk hijk and




Pt hijk jk

N
k
k = arg max
log2
+ Nk log2
. (28)
k
Nk 
Nk  + 1
Proof: Since no inter-cell interference occurs, it is optimal
that for each subchannel, each BS chooses an MS whose
channel gain is the best. In addition, by similar derivation in
lemma2, capacity increment when allocating subchannel j to
BS k is evaluated as in (28). Since BS and MS are chosen
to maximizes capacity, system capacity after power allocation
becomes maximal.
IV. J OINT P OWER AND S UBCHANNEL A LLOCATION
We propose a simple scheme based on the above theorems.
The detail algorithm of our proposed scheme is shown below.

a sub-optimal solution. In addition, this scheme requires small

amount of computations. In jth loop, the link capacity is
calculated for Kj times, so the computational 
complexity of
S
the proposed scheme can be evaluated as O( j=1 Kj) =
O(KS(S + 1)/2), which is polynomial and acceptable level
for real-time operation. Note that the proposed scheme can be
simply designed due to the simple BPA form.
V. N UMERICAL P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS OF P ROPOSED
S CHEME

Let hjk be hijk jk , and p and be the power and subchannel allocation indicator obtained from the proposed scheme.
Average system capacity can be mathematically expressed as
following


K
S 


h
p
[jk] jk
i
jk
. (29)
log2 1 +
E[C(p )] = E
2

j=1
k=1

[j]

Let k be the index of BS that loads power on subchannel j,

and hj = hjk[j] . Then, (29) can be changed to


S

Pt hj
Pt h1

E
log2
= SE log2
. (30)
2 Nk[j]
2 Nk[1]
j=1
Here, the derivation to (30) is based on i.i.d. channel gain
model. In addition, Nk follows binomial distribution with
parameter S and Pr(Aj (k)), where Aj (k) is the event that
BS k loads power on subchannel j. When S is sufficiently
large, Nk approximately follows normal distribution with
small variance. Thus, by approximating Nk to a fixed value
Nk = E[Nk ], (30) can be approximated as



Pt h1
S{E log2
(31)
log2 (Nk1 )}.
2



P h
We need to evaluate Nk and E log2 t2jk . Firstly, Nk
satisfies following,
Nk = S Pr (BS k loads power on subchannel 1)


Pt h1k
Pt h1k

>
,
k
=

k
= S Pr
Nk 2
Nk  2


 


h1k
h1k
=S
Pr
=s
Pr
< s ds
Nk
Nk
0
k =k


Nk
Nk 
Nk 
=S

exp
1exp  s ds.
mk
mk 
mk
0

1) Initialize parameters
k
j = 1, ij = 0, Nk = 0 and pjk = 0.
[jk]
2) Determine i .
i[jk] = arg max
hi jk

i Sk

3) For all k K, calculate C [k] .


Pt hi[jk] jk
Nk
[k]
)
C = log2 1 + 2
+Nk log2 (
(Nk + 1)
Nk + 1

(32)
(33)
(34)
(35)

k =k

Obviously, the term in left hand side of (33) is a monotonic

increasing function with respect to Nk , and the probability
in the right hand side of (33) is a decreasing function with
respect to Nk . Using this characteristics, Nk can be evaluated
by following iterative algorithm.
[0]
S
, i = 1.
1) Initialize : Nk = N
2) Calculate Pr(A1 (k)), the probability that BS k loads
power on a subchannel in ith iteration.

4) Select BS k which maximize C [k] .

5) Update the variables.
k
j = j + 1, [jk ] = 1, Nk = Nk + 1
i
j
6) Update the power

P

 [k ]
pj  k = N t , j {j | [j  k ]  = 1}
i
j
k
7) if j > S then stop. Otherwise go to 3).
For each subchannel, the system capacity when allocating
the subchannel to each BS is virtually calculated. Then, the
best BS whose capacity increment is the highest is chosen.
Since this scheme is based on above theorems, it can provide

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0

Pr(A1 (k)) =
(36)




[i]
[i]
[i]

Nk
Nk
Nk 
1exp

exp
s ds(37)
mk
mk 
mk 

k =k

[i]

(Nk

550

[i]

S Pr(A1 (k)))
(38)

[i+1]
[i+1]
[i+1]
K
= Nk
/ k=1 Nk
.
4) Normalize : Nk
5) Loop stops if i>Nt , otherwise i = i+1 and go to step 2.
Here, and Nt are a step size and number of iterations to
[i]
perform, respectively. In this algorithm, Nk is decreased
[i]
if Nk > S Pr(A1 (k)), and is increased otherwise. After
the sufficient number of iterations, we can obtain Nk which
satisfies equality. In addition,


 


Pt hjk
Pt s
E log2
log
=
Pr(h1 = s)ds (39)
2
2
2

 K

Pt s 
=
log2
Pr(A1 (k)) Pr(h1 = s|A1 (k))ds (40)
2
0
k=1



K
Pt s
=
log2
Pr(A1 (k)) Pr(hi[1k] 1k = s)ds.
(41)
2
0
Nk

= Nk

600

k=1

(40) is induced from Bayes theorem, (41) is induced from the

fact that hijk is i.i.d random variable. Here, Pr(A1 (k)) can
be evaluated as following
h1k
h1k
Pr(A1 (k)) = Pr(
<
, k  = k)
(42)
Nk 
Nk




Nk  s
h1k
h1k
=
Pr(
<
)=
1 exp
(43)
Nk 
Nk
Nk mk 
k =k
k =k

500

System Capacity (bit/s/Hz)

[i+1]

[i+1]

450
400
350
300
250
200

Equal Power
IWF
I-IWF
BPA (Simulation)
BPA (Analysis)
room = 30m
room = 50m

150
100
50
0
2

Fig. 4.

10

12

14

System capacity vs. distance between an MS and a BS

600

500

400

300
IWF
Equal Power
I-IWF
BPA
room = 30m
room = 50m

200

100

0
2

Using (43), (40) can be derived as following

K



Pt s  1
s
log2
exp

2
mk
mk
0
k=1

Nk  s
1 exp
ds
Nk mk 
k =k

Distance between a user and a BS (m)

user capacity (bit/s/Hz/user)

3) Update Nk

10

12

14

16

Number of users

Fig. 5.

(44)

Again, Nk is replaced with a fixed value Nk by central limit

theorem. By using (35) and (44), we can evaluate (31).
VI. N UMERICAL AND S IMULATION R ESULTS AND
C ONCLUSIONS
We perform simulation based on the topology in Fig. 2. The
room size was 30m and 50m. The number of subchannels was
24 and noise level was 174 dBm, and Pt was 15 dBm. Each
MS firstly chooses an appropriate BS as a serving node based
on average received signal strength. Then, BSs allocates power
based on each allocation scheme.
Fig. 4 shows system performance when there exist 5 MSs
located at fixed position on their own position and one of the
MSs changes its position. The results show that our proposed
scheme outperforms other conventional scheme. Note that
the performance of the proposed scheme degrades greatly as
the room gets bigger, because our proposed scheme is based
on the characteristics of dense environment and performance
degradation is significant when this assumption is not true. In
addition, we can see that results from analysis and simulation
matches well. Fig. 5 shows the system performance when a
certain number of MSs are uniformly distributed in the room.

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System capacity vs. number of users

These results show that the proposed scheme improves system

capacity by 5-15% compared to I-IWF scheme and 20-70%
compared to IWF scheme. Note that the performance gap
between the proposed scheme and the conventional scheme
decreases, because in case of conventional schemes, the average number of users loading power on the same subchannel
decreases and subchannel allocation becomes more likely to
be in BPA form.
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