Inter-cell interference coordination by joint employment of ABSF and power control in heterogeneous networks

Heterogeneous networks where low power nodes (e.g., femtocells) are employed in addition to existing macrocells have been proposed to cope with increasing data traffic. On the other hand, additionally installed femtocells incur interference against existing macrocells. The interference is particularly severe when the frequency band is shared by both a macrocell and femtocells for the efficient usage of channel resources. In this paper, we combine “almost blank subframes (ABSF)” and “femtocell power control” to mitigate such interference. To assess the performance of the proposed approach, computer simulations are performed. By the proposed approach, we obtained significantly mitigated interference while overall network capacity is marginally decreased compared to maximum capacity.