Interference management for self-organized femtocells towards green networks

Abstract

The femtocell concept is an emerging technology for deploying the next generation of the wireless networks, aiming at indoor coverage enhancement, increasing capacity and offloading the overlay macrocell traffic. One of the main challenges in short range femtocell networks is how to (re)configure the Home Node Bs (HNBs) in an autonomous manner so as to manage interference and diminish the energy consumption among nearby femtocells efficiently. In this paper, we investigate the indoor femtocell deployment making use of both the Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) and the Time Division Duplexing (TDD) methods. In the FDD case, the HNBs share both the Uplink (UL) and Downlink (DL) channels with the macrocell without any cooperation to coordinate their access to the air interface. Conversely, in the TDD underlay case, femtocells only reuse the macrocell UL spectrum and cooperate with each other in order to minimize the interference among themselves, either with or without further coordination with the Macro User Equipment (MUE). The proposed solution is evaluated by means of system-level simulations using the Monte Carlo approach. Investigations have shown that the TDD underlay approach not only reduces the perceived interference levels, but also diminishes the outage probability.