AN IMPROVED CROSS-TIER INTERFERENCE MITIGATION SCHEME IN A FEMTO-MACRO HETEROGENEOUS NETWORK

Abstract

The deployment of femtocells presents an attractive solution for the improvement of mobile
network services, providing better data rates and coverage to indoor users. Since the
deployment of femtocells results to a heterogeneous network, where two layers utilize the
available spectrum, issues of interference arise. The interference mitigation in literature
made use of a single or hybrid enhanced inter-cell interference coordination techniques to
reduce interference in heterogeneous networks. These techniques mitigate interference at
the expense of reduced capacity or coverage of the interfering cell as well as the network as
whole and also cause underutilization of the spectrum resources. A method used in this
research to address this challenge investigated the positions of the user equipment and the
installed femto base stations. The developed improved adaptive hybrid technique that
combined Time domain technique using reduced power ABS and Power control technique
was then used to mitigate the cross-tier interference between the femto base station and the
macro-user in the vicinity of the femtocell. This was done in order to achieve optimal and
fair overall performance of the network.