On Interference Aware Power Adjustment and Scheduling in Femtocell Networks

Densely-deployed femtocell networks are used to enhance wireless coverage in public spaces such as office buildings, subways, and academic buildings. These networks can increase user throughput, but edge users can suffer from co-channel interference and service outages. This paper introduces a distributed algorithm for network configuration, called Radius Reduction and Scheduling (RRS), to improve the performance and fairness of the network. RRS works by jointly adapting femtocell transmission power, allocating user to femtocells, and scheduling resource blocks so as to increase fairness and reduce outage probability in dense femtocell networks. RRS produces a network configuration that guarantees either user or area coverage depending on the management needs. A prototype implementation confirms the benefits of RRS in a real environment. Furthermore, extensive simulations show that RRS reduces the outage probability of up to 50%, and provides better fairness, with an increase in Jain’s index of 190%, with respect to a baseline algorithm which works with fixed power and best-effort scheduling and to a previous approach to resource management in femtocell networks.