Interference mitigation enhancement of switched-based scheme in over-loaded femtocells

This paper proposes adequate methods to improve the interference mitigation capability of a recently investigated switched-based interference reduction scheme in short-range open-access and over-loaded femtocells. It is assumed that the available orthogonal channels for the femtocell network are distributed among operating access points in close vicinity, where each of which knows its allocated channels a priori. For the case when the feedback links are capacity-limited and the available channels can be universally shared and simultaneously used, the paper presents enhanced schemes to identify a channel to serve the desired scheduled user by maintaining the interference power level within a tolerable range. They attempt to either complement the switched-based scheme by minimum interference channel selection or adopt different interference thresholds on available channels, while aiming to reduce the channels examination load. The performance of the proposed schemes is quantified and then compared with those of the single-threshold switched-based scheme via numerical and simulation results. © 2012 IEEE.