Adaptive Power Control Schemes for Interference Mitigation in LTE Femtocell Networks

The low-power, low-cost femtocell network has been proposed not only to alleviate traffic load to the macro base station (eNB) but also to cover the indoor coverage hole problem. However, in the dense femtocell environment where many femtocells are deployed to cover the whole large office building, performance of such femtocell environment can be deteriorated due to severe co-channel interference problem between the eNB and femtocells and among neighboring femtocells. In particular, a macro UE(mUE) located within femtocell coverage may experience severe co-channel interference from surrounding femtocells. Therefore, In this paper, we propose a novel power control schemes to mitigate interference to a mUE under such dense LTE femtocell environment. With proposed femtocell power control schemes, performance of the mUE can be greatly improved in terms of the outage probability and the SINR while maintaining satisfying femtocell performance. Simulation based performance study shows that the proposed power control scheme is able to enhance mUE performance more than 30% than the conventional dense femtocell in terms of the two performance metrics.