Interference management via access control and mobility prediction in two-tier heterogeneous networks

Abstract

Two-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets), where the current cellular networks, i.e., macrocells, are overlapped with a large number of randomly distributed femtocells, can potentially bring significant benefits to spectral utilization and system capacity. The interference management and access control for open and closed femtocells in two-tier HetNets were focused. The contributions consist of two parts. Firstly, in order to reduce the uplink interference caused by MUEs (macrocell user equipments) at closed femtocells, an incentive mechanism to implement interference mitigation was proposed. It encourages femtocells that work with closed-subscriber-group (CSG) to allow the interfering MUEs access in but only via uplink, which can reduce the interference significantly and also benefit the marco-tier. The interference issue was then studied in open-subscriber-group (OSG) femtocells from the perspective of handover and mobility prediction. Inbound handover provides an alternative solution for open femtocells when interference turns up, while this accompanies with PCI (physical cell identity) confusion during inbound handover. To reduce the PCI confusion, a dynamic PCI allocation scheme was proposed, by which the high handin femtocells have the dedicated PCI while the others share the reuse PCIs. A Markov chain based mobility prediction algorithm was designed to decide whether the femtocell status is with high handover requests. Numerical analysis reveals that the UL interference is managed well for the CSG femtocell and the PCI confusion issue is mitigated greatly in OSG femtocell compared to the conventional approaches.