Development of an Interference Reduction Scheme for Femtocell Network

The development of new multimedia applications has led to an increase in demand for broadband communications in recent years. To cater for this trend, it has been suggested to install cellular networks densely with extensive frequency reuse schemes. Densification of femtocells is a potential approach in this regard to meet the rising needs of mobile services and to sustain the Quality of Service (QoS) of users, especially for indoor users in situations such as homes and businesses. The primary issue with this type of setup is the co-tier (femtocell to femtocell) and cross-tier (femtocell to existing macrocell) interferences caused by many cells using the same spectrum at the same time. When femtocells are found in the macrocell's cell edge region, the issue becomes more complicated. This degrades the QoS. Therefore, reducing interferences is an important issue. Unfortunately, conventional methods of interference reduction have not been able to effectively tackle the interference problem in femtocell networks. To address this, a dynamic resource allocation method using the Breadth First Search (BFS) algorithm was developed in this study. In this study, femtocell was modeled considering low density and high density Femtocell Access Point (FAP) deployments to evaluate their impact of interference on the performance of the developed scheme. Modelling and simulations were carried out in MATLAB software environment. The results obtained showed that the developed scheme was able to reduce the interference level between femtocell users. Likewise, the developed scheme outperformed the conventional method of interference reduction in femtocell network. The study also reveals that more number of users can be accommodated with reduced interference level when the low density FAP deployments were used.