Dynamic Inter-Cell Interference Avoidance in Self-Organizing Femtocell Networks

Femtocells are expected as the surest way to increase the system capacity with higher-quality links and more spatial reuse in future networks. In spite of their great potential, the system capacity is highly susceptible to network density because a large portion of users are exposed to inter-cell interference (ICI). In this work, we proposed a dynamic interference avoidance scheme in densely deployed cell environments. Our proposed DDIA (Distributed Dynamic ICI Avoidance) scheme not only works in a fully distributed manner, but also controls interference link connectivity of users with high agility so that it is suited for self-organizing networks (SONs). We introduced the concept of ICI-link and two-tier scheduling in designing the DDIA scheme. To avoid ICI without any central entity, our scheme tries to harmonize all base stations (BSs) with users adaptively. Through extensive simulations, it was shown that our proposed scheme improves the throughput of users by more than twice on average compared to the frequency reuse factor 1 scheme, who are exposed to ICI while maintaining or even improving overall network performance. Our scheme operates well regardless of network density and topology.