  This paper investigates the price-based resource allocation strategies for
the uplink transmission of a spectrum-sharing femtocell network, in which a
central macrocell is underlaid with distributed femtocells, all operating over
the same frequency band as the macrocell. Assuming that the macrocell base
station (MBS) protects itself by pricing the interference from the femtocell
users, a Stackelberg game is formulated to study the joint utility maximization
of the macrocell and the femtocells subject to a maximum tolerable interference
power constraint at the MBS. Especially, two practical femtocell channel
models: sparsely deployed scenario for rural areas and densely deployed
scenario for urban areas, are investigated. For each scenario, two pricing
schemes: uniform pricing and non-uniform pricing, are proposed. Then, the
Stackelberg equilibriums for these proposed games are studied, and an effective
distributed interference price bargaining algorithm with guaranteed convergence
is proposed for the uniform-pricing case. Finally, numerical examples are
presented to verify the proposed studies. It is shown that the proposed
algorithms are effective in resource allocation and macrocell protection
requiring minimal network overhead for spectrum-sharing-based two-tier
femtocell networks.
