A Voting-Based Femtocell Downlink Cell-Breathing Control Mechanism

An overlay macrocell-femtocell system aims to increase the system capacity with a low-cost infrastructure. To construct such an infrastructure, we need to solve some existing problems. First, there is a tradeoff between femtocell coverage and overall system throughput, which we defined as the cell-breathing phenomenon. In light of this, we propose a femtocell downlink cell-breathing control framework to strike a balance between the coverage and data rate. Second, due to the selfish nature of mobile stations, the system information collected from them does not necessarily reflect the true status of the system. Thus, we design FEmtocell Virtual Election Rule (FEVER), a voting-based direct mechanism that only requires users to report their channel quality information to the femtocell base station. Not only is it proved to be truthful and has low implementation complexity, but it also strikes a balance between efficiency and fairness to meet the different needs. The simulation results verify the enhanced system performance under the FEVER mechanism.