Energy-efficient wireless in-home: the need for interference-controlled femtocells

Fostering growth in provisioning of wireless data at the same or even reduced energy expenditure levels, is crucial to society and thus one of the most important goals of the ICT sector. Femtocells, installed at customer premises, have emerged as a promising energy-efficient solution as connectivity is provided where and when needed. This article thus first overviews femtocell deployments in the context of 3G LTE and its advanced (LTE-A) networks. It is shown that to increase spectral efficiency, operators envisage utilizing the same spectrum for femtocells as well as overlaying macrocells. This in turn leads to significant interference between macro and femto as well as adjacent femtocells, the mitigation of which yields some major power gains. We therefore present various recent interference management schemes and quantify their throughput in the context of an LTE-A cellular network overlaying femtocells. Complete downlink system-level simulations corroborate exposed analysis and thus confirm the performance effectiveness of femtocell deployments.