Femtocell power control methods based on users context information in two-tier heterogeneous networks
In this paper, we consider a two-tier macrocell/ femtocell overlaid heterogeneous network based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology. Although the co-channel spectrum allocation provides larger bandwidth for both macrocell and femtocells, the resulting cross-tier interference may prevent macrocell users in the vicinity of femtocells to achieve their minimum required signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) in downlink. Therefore, we propose femtocell power control strategies for mitigating the interference experienced by macrocell users while preventing the femtocell throughput degradation. In particular, the proposed power control schemes make use of femto and macro users context information in terms of positioning for setting the appropriate prioritization weights among the current victim macro users and the femto users in outage. System-level simulations show that our schemes enhance the throughput of macrocell users while maintaining a high performance for femtocell users compared to a conventional power allocation. Moreover, we show that the proposed prioritization weights allow to achieve the required level of macrocell/femtocell throughput trade-off.
femtocell power control heterogeneous networks macrocell interference management