Interference Mitigation for Femtocell Networks Via Adaptive Frequency Reuse

The dense deployment of femtocells has brought new challenges for interference management. Flexible and efficient frequency reuse is one of promising approaches to tackling interference among femtocells. In this paper, we propose a semistatic intercell interference coordination (ICIC) scheme called adaptive frequency reuse (AFR). The proposed AFR scheme involves two algorithms, namely, primary subchannel self-configuration (PSC-SC), that served as ICIC, and interference-aware resource allocation, that served as intracell resource allocation. Compared with the no-ICIC scheme (i.e., Reuse 1), the proposed AFR scheme can achieve around 100% gain in terms of spectrum efficiency of cell-edge users with a minimal impact on the spectrum efficiency of cell-center users. Furthermore, the proposed PSC-SC algorithm is characteristic of low signaling overhead and fast convergence, which is very suitable for femtocell networks with constrained-capacity backhaul.