Interference identification and resource management in OFDMA femtocell networks

Inter-femtocell interference significantly limits the achievable throughput of an OFDMA femtocell system, which calls for interference management tailored for femtocell net-works. A typical approach to mitigate inter-femtocell interference is known as resource isolation, which aims at assigning nonoverlapping resources to interfering femtocells. One of the main challenges for interference mitigation in femtocell networks is that the femtocells are often installed by end-consumers without any pre-planning. Very limited information about the femtocells is available, making it hard to decipher the inter-femtocell interference. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to identify inter-femtocell interference by analyzing the received patterns observed by mobile stations. We conducted experiments to demonstrate that the proposed interference identification method can successfully identify real interferers while excluding non-interfering femtocells from suspicious interferers. Based on the proposed interference identification, we propose a weighted vertex-coloring based resource assignment algorithm to allocate resources with better fairness and achieve higher throughput.