Femtocells interference avoidance using Femtocell Identification

Femtocells are cost-effective means of providing indoor coverage in LTE cellular system. Furthermore, their decreased cell sizes provide improved cell capacity through increased spatial reuse. However, co-channel interference is one of the most critical challenges facing LTE femtocell deployment. This paper proposes to use Femtocell Identification (FID) approach to avoid co-channel interference between neighbour femtocells without operator intervention. Each femtocell has to cognitively detect other femtocells FID and their frequency allocation from the network environment and allocate the unoccupied resource blocks for interference avoidance. FID is designed such that each resource blocks assignment to a femtocell has a unique FID frequency allocation that distinguishes this assignment. Each femtocell through its FID allocation sends a message to the nearby femtocells. The simulation results show that the FID detection can be achieved even at low SNR region.