Distributed Capacity Based Channel Allocation for Dense Local Area Deployments

Local area deployments in general and femtocells in particular have proved to be an effective solution for providing ubiquitous coverage in a cost-efficient manner, satisfying the high data rate and QoS requirements for LTE-Advanced systems. In this paper, we investigate inter-cell interference management schemes for dense local area deployments. We propose a distributed capacity based channel allocation scheme where Home Base Stations (HBS) autonomously decide whether to use a carrier or not, based on the capacity improvements gained by using that carrier compared to the capacity loss experienced in neighboring HBSs already using the same carrier. We have also studied centralized schemes to understand how well the distributed schemes are performing. We present numerical results obtained for the proposed schemes which show significant improvements to cell-edge users with almost no compromise in mean throughput.