Interference coordination between femtocells in LTE-advanced networks with carrier aggregation

Femtocells technology has emerged as a promising solution to provide the indoor coverage in the 3rd generation (3G) long-term evolution (LTE) and its advanced (LTE-Advanced) networks. In this paper, we propose a two-step interference coordination scheme to deal with the interference between femtocells in LTE-Advanced networks with carrier aggregation. Each femtocell is assigned a carrier that is non-overlapping with its interfering femtocells or has the least interference in the first step. Then, in the second step, more carriers are attempted to be used by a femtocell in order to improve the system spectrum efficiency based on the specified utility functions. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed interference coordination scheme in terms of throughput.