PurposeFemtocells are low-power, inexpensive base stations (BS) used in business enterprises or homes. They could offer higher SNR in a smaller coverage area to enhance the data rates and QoS. Deployment of femtocell is expected to the witness constant development in upcoming years. Despite of all these benefits, there are certain challenges to be resolved that includes management of overlaying MC, interference among femtocells and the resource allocation between 2 tiers.Design/methodology/approachThis work analyses the issues on cross-tier interfering and resource allocation alleviation in “full-duplex (FD) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) oriented Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) that includes macrocell as well as underlying femtocells”. This work concerns on three foremost contributions: portraying a single objective issue including subcarrier allocation, price allocation and power allocation of macrocell–femtocell networks. Moreover, this work introduces a novel Cat Swarm Mated-Lion algorithm (CSM-LA) for solving the defined optimization problem in macrocell–femtocell networks. At last, the supremacy of adopted scheme is proved over traditional models regarding statistical and convergence analysis.FindingsBy concerning the cost function, the developed CSM-LA attained 87.5, 60, 93.75 and 93.75% better than LM, WOA, LA and CSO respectively. For utility analysis, it accomplished 70.58% better than LM, 88.23% superior to GWO, 85.88% superior to WOA and 88.23% better than CSO. For statistical analysis, the median performance of developed CSM-LA attained better results, which was 80.52% superior to LA, 80.74% better than GWO, 72% superior to WOA and 48.7% better than LA. Hence, the developed CSM-LA proved its performance in terms of improved results and revealed its betterment over the conventional models.Originality/valueThis paper adopts a latest optimization algorithm called CSM-LA for analyzing the issues on cross-tier interfering and resource allocation alleviation in full-duplex (FD) orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) oriented heterogeneous networks (HetNets). This is the first work that utilizes CSM-LA framework that proposes a new CSM-LA model for power control and resource allocation by considering the multi-objectives like price, subcarrier and power as well.