Co‐tier downlink interference management in dense femtocell networks

Abstract

Summary With the adoption of long‐term evolution standard for 4G mobile communications, the deployment of femtocell base stations (FBSs) to cope with the surging traffic in mobile wireless communication is becoming increasingly popular. However, with the random installation of FBSs, the problem of interference among FBSs is still a challenge. In this paper, assuming the presence of a femtocell management system that can control and coordinate the densely deployed FBSs, a novel power backoff scheme is proposed that determines the appropriate transmit power of each FBS so that the interference is reduced. Simulation results for randomly deployed FBSs in an environment with shadowing using MATLAB are provided, showing that our proposed methods can effectively mitigate the co‐tier downlink interference while improving the system capacity in a densely deployed femtocell network with shared spectrum use. Quantitatively, the average interference is reduced by roughly 90% to 100% of dBm, and the average capacity is increased by more than 80%. These results attest to the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.