On the Impact of Explicit Uplink Information on Autonomous Component Carrier Selection for LTE-A Femtocells

The increasing popularity of the femtocell concept has revamped the interest in dynamic interference coordination techniques for dense and uncoordinated deployments of low- power home base stations. One of the proposed schemes for 4G OFDMA femtocells is known as Autonomous Component Carrier Selection (ACCS). ACCS capitalizes on the carrier aggregation framework of LTE-Advanced to curb inter-cell interference levels. Albeit being exclusively based on downlink information, previous contributions attested the effectiveness of the scheme in the uplink as well. This paper extends the initial argumentation by including uplink information into the component carrier selection process. We assess and discuss the uplink performance of two proposed variants of ACCS via extensive system level simulations. The striking conclusion based on the results is that the mere addition of uplink information, which is difficult to estimate in the real world, does not provide substantial performance improvements.