Interference mitigation in femtocell networks by efficient frequency reuse

Abstract

The huge deployment of femtocells is facing different technical challenges. The main among the challenges of femtocell is interference management. Because of the scarcity of the spectrum operators are interested to deploy the femtocells in a co-channel fashion, this macrocell and femtocells will operates in the same frequency bands. This in turn gives rise to severe interference challenges. An interference limited efficient frequency reuse is one of the promising approaches to overcome the interference problems in femtocells. We propose an inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) scheme named adaptive frequency reuse (AFR). It consists of two algorithms, namely primary sub-channel self-configuration algorithm and interference-known resource allocation algorithm which works as an intra-cell resource allocation. Compared with the reuse 1 and reuse 3 the proposed scheme can achieve gain in terms of spectrum efficiency of cell-edge users (CEUs) by giving less impact to the spectrum efficiency of cell-centre users (CCUs). The proposed scheme has the fast convergence, low signalling overhead and good fairness.