Downlink Power Control for Femtocell Networks

With the deployment of numerous femtocells within macrocells, the rapidly expanding femto base stations have to be self-organizing for interference management, coverage and capacity optimization. This paper focuses on the issue of downlink power control for femtocell self-organization. Different downlink power control strategies have been thoroughly studied with realistic LTE system parameters. We have shown that downlink power control can effectively balance the performance between macrocell and femtocell, and mitigate interference or optimize coverage and capacity. Our study provides useful guidelines for network operators in practical network planning, in which a careful balance should be struck in maintaining satisfactory network performance and user QoS in heterogeneous networks.