Downlink Power Control for Dense Small Cell Deployment in LTE-Advanced

This paper proposes a power control scheme that reduces the small cell interference for sets of user equipment (UE) at the cell edge. 3GPP LTE-Advanced adopted small cell enhancement to improve both the cell average and cell edge throughput. However, since the number of small cells in one cluster is increasing, the interference between small cells will increase significantly. As is well known, if the power level is reduced in a serving cell, the UEs in the same cell will experience throughput loss and UEs in neighboring cells will experience throughput improvement. In order to tradeoff the throughput loss and improvement, this paper presents a method to estimate accurately the loss and improvement. Then a transmission power decision method depending on loss and improvement is described. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme improves the cell edge throughput by a maximum of 33%.