Cognitive Interference Management for LTE-A Femtocells with Distributed Carrier Selection

The concept of small cells such as femtocells has been regarded as a promising solution to overcome the indoor coverage problem and deal with the growth of traffic within macrocells. However, the unpredictable deployment pattern of such cells makes centralized network planning impractical and requires more efficient interference management and distributed spectrum planning schemes to realize the benefit of femtocells. In this paper, we propose a cognitive-based interference management solution for LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) femtocells by sharing measured pathloss information among neighbors and selecting component carriers according to the estimated mutual interference. System-level simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively avoid spectrum collision and significantly improve overall network capacity.