## 1 Introduction  
In certain scenarios, a 3G femtocell, Home Node-B (HNB) in 3 GPP terminology, is a cost-effective alternative to providing indoor coverage compared to outdoor high power base stations [1]. Furthermore, for incumbent operators with very limited spectrum resources and a great amount of fixed network installations, HNBs may be used to roll out significant cellular capacity. For such deployments, HNBs and wide area macro Node-Bs (MNB) often will need to co-exist in the same frequency band. This is the most challenging deployment scenario and therefore the one considered in this paper. For the co-channel case, a tradeoff among protecting macro users and boosting femto performance must be found, see e.g., [1, 2, 3, 4] and embedded references. However, the proposed scheme also offers benefits for HNBs deployed on a dedicated carrier. We consider both cases when the HNB is configured for open or closed subscriber access (OSG and CSG). While provisioning is equally important, some interference aspects are relaxed in the OSG case. However, even when HNBs are configured for open access by all macro users, their potential configuration and density can still pose a risk to e.g., macro uplink. For other considerations related to mobility performance and the recommended use of reserved macro-only carrier, the reader is referred to [1]. Besides the physical deployment aspects, operators that deploy HNBs also have a sales and provisioning strategy that is based around the service level agreement defined with the end-customer. As examples, 3G HNB may be deployed as a voice coverage solution which supplements a parallel Wi-Fi solution for data, or it may be provisioned as a stand-alone mobile broadband solution. Any provisioned solution must fulfill end-customer requirements and at the same time meet operator requirements related to wide area performance, including robustness and data offload effect. In this paper, our ultimate goal is to explore the extent possible for autonomous QoS (quality of service) self-provisioning and interference management. A key aspect which will receive continued growing research interest to drive down deployment cost of dense small cell networks in the future. Specifically, and from an operator's viewpoint, we want to clarify if it is possible to control deployment by means of distributing only intuitive deployment parameters such as guaranteed coverage (in meters or dB) and downlink and uplink data rates for anyone connected to the 3G HNB. To do so, we make use of a light-cognitive element of the 3G HNB; e.g., the simple built-in user equipment (UE) receiver module that can be used to sense the surrounding network. This module enables what is known as network listen mode (NLM) [1]. We want to see if by conducting advanced processing enabled by NLM we can ensure that deployed and uncoordinated HNB can fulfill the service level agreement while at the same time self-minimizing dead zones and remaining within an allowed interference budget to protect the wide area uplink performance. For 3G HNBs, 3 GPP does not specify interference management and provisioning techniques and these are left for proprietary implementation and thus an object for extensive research. Most common reference assumptions, also applied as references throughout this paper, is a full-power transmit mode as well as an interference management solution standardized for LTE but adapted for 3G here [1]. Other research has pursued similar goals and considered interference management tradeoffs in co-channel deployments, ranging from general analysis in e.g., [2, 5] to practical schemes that utilize NLM measurements combined with UE measurements in e.g., [6] and uplink measurements in e.g., [7]to gain more knowledge of the local deployment conditions prior to optimization. Closed-loop methods between macro and small cell layer have been considered to adapt uplink power control settings [8,9].