6. Conclusion
In this paper, we studied the RA and interference management problem in dense OFDM femtocell networks. In this context, the FAP will be responsible for the clustering phase, and then the CH (elected from the femtocell group) will be responsible for the sub-channel and power allocation phase. Our formulation leads to a mixed integer programming problem which is computationally intractable. So we divided the problem into two subproblems: clustering subproblem and subchannel and power allocation subproblem. First, femtocells are grouped into clusters to lower intra-tier interference. Then, the CCs will be responsible for the subchannel and power allocation in each cluster. We allocate subchannels to FUs by considering the rate gap between each FU's current rate and its requirement. Finally, we develop a fast algorithm which can achieve the optimal power distribution with a complexity of O(M N) 2 by exploiting the structure of the power distribution problem. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods. For future work, we can consider QoS requirements. Uncertainty in channel gain information can be considered as well using a robust optimization framework. Instead of maximizing data rate, other objectives such as maximizing the energy efficiency can also be considered for clustering-based resource allocation in multi-tier OFDMA cellular networks.