Downlink interference minimization in cooperative cognitive LTE-femtocell networks

Abstract

Abstract Femtocell is considered to be one of the most promising solutions for future indoor wireless communication. Due to the scarcity of spectrum resources, femtocells need to share the spectrum with other networks, which will inevitably bring in severe interference. Therefore, minimizing the cross-tier and co-tier interference while maintaining high system throughput or spectrum efficiency is one of main challenges before largely deploying femtocell networks. In order to effectively mitigate the interference, cognitive radio-enabled techniques can play a key role by providing more secondary spectrum access opportunities, especially in dense femtocells deployment scenarios. Supported by cognitive radio functionality, femtocell users can access and share these licensed spectra including the frequency bands of both macrocells and other licensed systems (e.g., TV white spaces) as long as not causing harmful interference to the coexisting licensed systems. In this paper, based on cognitive sensing, we propose a joint channel assignment and power allocation scheme, aiming to minimize the aggregate interference from multiple femtocells to the licensed users while satisfying the constraints of each femtocell’s capacity and power budget. It is believed that the cooperation among multiple femtocells is quite helpful in mitigating the interference considering the mobility of the licensed users. Specifically, Hungarian algorithm is involved in our scheme to address the co-tier femtocell interference issue. In order to illustrate our scheme more explicitly, we come up with the concepts of Physical Cluster and Virtual Cluster and synthetically apply the related algorithms to reduce the interference step by step. Finally, the performances of employed algorithms are evaluated and analyzed. Numerical results have validated that the proposed scheme is viable and effective in managing the femtocell interference.