A CoMP-Based outage compensation solution for heterogeneous femtocell networks

Abstract

In wireless cellular networks, self-healing is one of the three functionalities for self-organizing networks, and it has four major components: fault detection, fault diagnosis, fault response and fault recovery. In this paper, we propose a cell outage compensation mechanism (fault response scheme) using a network cooperation scheme in a heterogeneous network environment with densely deployed Femto Base Stations (FBSs). The network cooperation scheme for FBSs uses the Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission and reception with joint processing technique where the main purpose of cooperation among FBSs is to guarantee service to UEs even in cases where their primary FBSs or their backhauls fail. The objective of our proposed mechanism is to maximize the total users’ throughput taking into consideration the spectrum and power constraints. Therefore, different clustering methods are studied and analyzed to improve the performance of the network cooperation scheme. Simulation results show that our proposed network cooperation scheme using CoMP can improve the Femto User Equipment (FUE) throughput by more than 30% compared to a non-cooperation solution for self-healing, and CoMP schemes with spectral clustering and k-means clustering algorithms can improve FUE throughput by up to 50%. Moreover, the proposed CoMP operation schemes prevent service rate from dramatic drop when FBSs fail.