Beamforming strategy using adaptive beam patterns and power control for common control channel in hierarchical cell structure networks

Beamforming techniques have been successfully utilized for traffic channels in order to solve the interference problem. However, their use for control channels has not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, a (semi-) centralized beamforming strategy that adaptively changes beam patterns and controls the total transmit power of cells is proposed for the performance enhancement of the common channel in hierarchical cell structure (HCS) networks. In addition, some examples of its practical implementation with low complexity are presented for two-tier HCS networks consisting of macro and pico cells. The performance of the proposed scheme has been evaluated through multi-cell system-level simulations under optimistic and pessimistic interference scenarios. The cumulative distribution function of user geometry or channel quality has been used as a performance metric since in the case of common control channel the number of outage users is more important than the sum rate. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme provides a significant gain compared to the random beamforming scheme as well as conventional systems that do not use the proposed algorithm. Finally, the proposed scheme can be applied simultaneously to several adjacent macro and pico cells even if it is designed primarily for the pico cell within macro cells.