Interference Management and Six-Sector Macrocells for Performance Improvement in Femto–Macro Cellular Networks

Abstract

Femtocells are considered as a solution for indoor high data rate demands. Interference mitigation is a fundamental challenge in two-tier femto–macrocell networks. In this paper, we consider six-sector macrocell layout for reducing the co-tier interference in the macrocell network and cross-tier interferences from macrocell to femtocell network. As interference reduces, the whole of available spectrum can be used in each macrocell which increases the spectrum efficiency. We also consider interference-level algorithm to allocate resource for femtocell in which macrocell uses the whole of spectrum. In the coverage area of each sector, femtocell uses a portion of the spectrum that is not used by the macrocell users. This approach ignores the high co-channel interference from the macrocell network to the femtocell network and vice versa in each sector. Simulation results show that the proposed layout and interference management scheme reduce the downlink interference and increase the efficiency of the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)-based femtocell and macrocell. Consequently, system throughput and outage probability are improved significantly.