LOGA: Local grouping architecture for self-healing femtocell networks

Self-healing functionality is developed to allow Self-Organizing Networks (SON) autonomously recover from outage. The dynamic topology and configurations of femtocell access points (femto APs) bring significant challenges for enabling self-healing functionality in femtocell networks. Observing that outage in femtocells only has local impacts, this paper proposes a local grouping architecture (LOGA). To recover from outage, LOGA forms the Inner Group to make reconfigurations of femtocells as local as possible. Furthermore, to prevent these reconfigurations from causing extra outages, LOGA sets additional constraints on the Outer Group, which consists of femtocells in the vicinity of the reconfigured femtocells. To properly form local groups in this architecture, a sequential grouping algorithm is proposed. Numerical results demonstrate that LOGA outperforms the existing self-healing scheme both in the number of reconfigured femtocells and in the recovered SINR.