SDN‐Based Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering Algorithm for Interference Mitigation in Ultra‐Dense Small Cell Networks

Ultra‐dense small cell networks (UD‐SCNs) have been identified as a promising scheme for next‐generation wireless networks capable of meeting the ever‐increasing demand for higher transmission rates and better quality of service. However, UD‐SCNs will inevitably suffer from severe interference among the small cell base stations, which will lower their spectral efficiency. In this paper, we propose a software‐defined networking (SDN)‐based hierarchical agglomerative clustering (SDN‐HAC) framework, which leverages SDN to centrally control all sub‐channels in the network, and decides on cluster merging using a similarity criterion based on a suitability function. We evaluate the proposed algorithm through simulation. The obtained results show that the proposed algorithm performs well and improves system payoff by 18.19% and 436.34% when compared with the traditional network architecture algorithms and non‐cooperative scenarios, respectively.