A novel downlink power control scheme in LTE heterogeneous network

Femtocells are low-power user-deployed base stations that operate in licensed spectrum and provide high-quality cellular service in indoor environments. However, there may be severe cross-tier interference between femtocells and macrocells. In this paper, our focus is on downlink traffic channel interference management for macrocell users. We propose a novel interference management scheme in macro-femto cochannel deployment scenario. The femtocell adjusts its maximum transmit power to suppress the cross-tier interference experienced by macro users in its close proximity. Simulation results show that this scheme effectively reduces the interference and compensates the downlink throughput degradation of the macro user. Compared with smart power control scheme based on network listening, the proposed scheme could get a good trade-off between the improvement of macrocell users' throughput and the degradation of femtocell users' throughput.