QoS Priority Based Femtocell User Power Control for Interference Mitigation in 3GPP LTE-A HetNet

In recent years, development of femtocells are receiving considerable attention towards increasing the network coverage, capacity, and improvement in the quality of service for users. In 3GPP LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) system, to efficiently utilize the bandwidth, femtocell and macro cell uses the same frequency band, but this deployment poses a technical challenge of cross-tier interference to macro users. In this paper, the novel quality of service based fractional power control (QoS-FPC) scheme under the heterogeneous networks environment is proposed, which considers the users priority and QoS-requirements during the power allocation. The proposed QoS-FPC scheme has two focal points: firs, it protects the macrocell users uplink communication by limiting the cross-tier interference at eNB below a given threshold, and second, it ensures the optimization of femtocell users power allocation at each power adjustment phase. Performance gain is demonstrated with extensive system-level simulations to show that the proposed QoS-FPC scheme significantly decreases the cross-tier intereference and improves the overall users throughput.