Cooperative Resource Allocation for Self-Healing in Small Cell Networks

To operate the network efficiently and reduce operational expenditures, self-organization becomes a key feature especially for dense-deployed small cell networks. This paper proposes a coalition game based resource allocation algorithm (CG-CRA) to enable self-healing and compensate abrupt cell outage in small cell networks. In the proposed algorithm, small cells play coalition games to form a set of coalitions which determines the allocation of subchannels, and each coalition of small cells serves a user cooperatively with optimized power allocation. Simulation results show that, the proposed algorithm can effectively solve network failure problem. In addition, all users are served fairly and network resources are efficiently utilized at the same time.