On placement and dynamic power control of femtocells in LTE HetNets

Femto cells a.k.a. Low Power Nodes (LPNs) are used to improve indoor data rates as well as to reduce traffic load on macro Base Stations (BSs) in LTE cellular networks. These LPNs are deployed inside office buildings and residential apartment complexes to provide high data rates to indoor Users. With high SINR (Signal-to-Interference plus Noise Ratio) the users experience good throughput, but the SINR decreases significantly because of interference and obstacles such as building walls, present in the communication path. So, efficient placement of Femtos in buildings while considering Macro-Femto interference is very crucial for attaining desirable SINR. At the same time, minimizing the power leakage in order to improve the signal strength of outdoor users in a high interference (HIZone) around the building area is important. In our work, we have considered obstacles (walls, floors) and interference between Macro and Femto BSs. To be fair to both indoor and outdoor users, we designed an efficient placement and power control SON (Self organizing Network) algorithm which optimally places Femtos and dynamically adjusts the transmission power of Femtos based on the occupancy of Macro users in the HIZone. To do this, we solve two Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) methods namely: Minimize number of Femtos (MinNF) method which guarantees threshold SINR (SINR
_Th
) -2dB for all indoor users and optimal Femto power (OptFP) allocation method which guarantees SINR
_Th
(- 4 dB) for indoor users with the Macro users SINR degradation as lesser than 2dB.