Coordinated partial co-channel deployment in two-layer networks

Reducing the interference level between the overlapped femtocells and macrocells is one of the main issues facing femtocells deployment. In this paper, a new coordinated scheduling technique based on femtocell-aware frequency planning is proposed. This technique is based on partial co-channel deployment between the macrocell and the femtocell. The main idea of the proposed scheme is to enable the coordination of the spectrum arrangement schemes between the overlapped macrocells and femtocells based on the requested user traffic, taking into consideration the different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for the different users applications. The macro base station uses the information about the femtocells used frequency band as well as the information about the requested macro user traffic in making the scheduling decisions so that the cross-layer interference between macrocells and femtocells is reduced. Extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the performance improvements of the proposed scheme in terms of the macro user blocking probability and the throughput.