Location Based Autonomous Power Control for ICIC in LTE-A Heterogeneous Networks

Small cells are regarded as a promising solution to achieve green communication and deal with the coverage holes within macrocells. However, close subscriber group femtocells with universal frequency reuse introduce strong cross-tier interference in both uplink and downlink and thus reducing the overall system capacity. Conventional LTE-A macrocells only apply power control in uplink while LTE-A femtocells need both downlink and uplink power control schemes to effectively deal with the new cross-tier interference scenarios. In this paper, location based autonomous downlink power setting and uplink fraction power control schemes are proposed specifically for femtocells in order to mitigate the cross-tier interference. It is demonstrated with extensive system simulations that the proposed power control schemes can significantly improve the Macro-UE outage probability in downlink and assure the Femto-UEs with increased capacity in uplink.