Dynamic resource partitioning for downlink femto-to-macro-cell interference avoidance

  • Authors:

  • Zubin Bharucha;Andreas Saul;Gunther Auer;Harald Haas

  • Affiliations:

  • DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH, Munich, Germany;DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH, Munich, Germany;DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH, Munich, Germany;School of Engineering and Electronics, Institute for Digital Communications, Joint Research Institute for Signal and Image Processing, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

  • Venue:
  • EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking - Special issue on femtocell networks
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Femto-cells consist of user-deployed Home Evolved NodeBs (HeNBs) that promise substantial gains in system spectral efficiency, coverage, and data rates due to an enhanced reuse of radio resources. However, reusing radio resources in an uncoordinated, random fashion introduces potentially destructive interference to the system, both, in the femto and macro layers. An especially critical scenario is a closed-access femto-cell, cochannel deployed with a macro-cell, which imposes strong downlink interference to nearby macro user equipments (UEs) that are not permitted to hand over to the femto-cell. In order to maintain reliable service of macro-cells, it is imperative to mitigate the destructive femto-cell to macro-cell interference. The contribution in this paper focuses on mitigating downlink femto-cell to macro-cell interference through dynamic resource partitioning, in the way that HeNBs are denied access to downlink resources that are assigned to macro UEs in their vicinity. By doing so, interference to the most vulnerable macro UEs is effectively controlled at the expense of a modest degradation in femto-cell capacity. The necessary signaling is conveyed through downlink high interference indicator (DL-HII) messages over the wired backbone. Extensive system level simulations demonstrate that by using resource partitioning, for a sacrifice of 4% of overall femto downlink capacity, macro UEs exposed to high HeNB interference experience a tenfold boost in capacity.