Centralised power setting for femtocell cluster

Femtocell is a key technology to improve coverage and capacity in indoor environments. However, its co-channel deployment across a macrocell network may lead to severe interference in presence of a closed subscriber group (CSG) access policy. Power setting is a simple way to partly address this problem by adapting the femtocell power to its macrocell surroundings. In this paper, we propose a linear programming-based power management solution adapted to clusters of femtocells which outperforms traditional approaches in terms of outage and energy consumed. This centralized method allows the switch-off of the most disrupting femtocells in order to improve the overall network performance, which is particularly useful in the context of femtocells cluster broadcasting the same CSG. Since our proposed method does not rely on dedicated hardware, it could also be run in an open IT cloud platform.