An ecosystem-based load control scheme with virtual coverage adjustments for two-tier femtocell networks

An abrupt increase in traffic load can cause traffic overloading situation, thereby degrading the performance of two-tier femtocell networks. In this paper, we propose an ecosystem-based downlink load control scheme with virtual coverage adjustments for two-tier femtocell networks, in which the coverage of hotspot macrocell is virtually controlled by adjusting handover parameters of serving cell and target cell. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can effectively prevent traffic overloading, and thus improve the performance of the two-tier LTE network. In addition, the two-tier network with the proposed scheme can maintain the network stability through intermediate-scale adjustments of virtual coverage.