Coverage optimization for femtocell clusters using modified particle swarm optimization

Coverage optimization is a main challenge for femtocell clusters which are considered to be a promising solution to provide seamless cellular coverage for large indoor areas. Although particle swarm optimization (PSO) can be employed to solve the coverage optimization of femtocell clusters, it reduces to single particle swarm optimization (SPSO) when only one femtocell cluster is considered and can only find the local optimum solution. In this paper, a modified PSO (MPSO) algorithm is proposed, which employs a heuristic power control scheme to guide the algorithm to search for the global optimum solution. Simulation results show that MPSO significantly outperforms SPSO and fixed power scheme with low complexity. Moreover, MPSO can converge rapidly and is suitable for online coverage optimization.