• ETRI Journal
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.318-329
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• 2018

Femtocell (FC) technology envisaged as a cost-effective approach to attain better indoor coverage of mobile voice and data service. Deployment of FCs over macrocell forms a heterogeneous network. In urban areas, the key factor limits the successful deployment of FCs is inter-cell interference (ICI), which severely affects the performance of victim users. Autonomous FC transmission power setting is one straightforward way for coordinating ICI in the downlink. Application of intelligent control using soft computing techniques has not yet explored well for wireless networks. In this work, autonomous FC transmission power setting strategy using Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System is proposed. The main advantage of the proposed method is zero signaling overhead, reduced computational complexity and bare minimum delay in performing power setting of FC base station because only the periodic channel measurement reports fed back by the user equipment are needed. System level simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by providing much better throughput, even under high interference activation scenario and cell edge users can be prevented from going outage.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.175-185
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• 2020

Inter-cell interference (ICI) is a major problem in heterogeneous networks, such as two-tier femtocell (FC) networks, because it leads to poor cell-edge throughput and system capacity. Dynamic ICI coordination (ICIC) schemes, which do not require prior frequency planning, must be employed for interference avoidance in such networks. In contrast to existing dynamic ICIC schemes that focus on homogeneous network scenarios, we propose a novel semi-distributed dynamic ICIC scheme to mitigate interference in heterogeneous network scenarios. With the goal of maximizing the utility of individual users, two separate algorithms, namely the FC base station (FBS)-level algorithm and FC management system (FMS)-level algorithm, are employed to restrict resource usage by dominant interference-creating cells. The distributed functionality of the FBS-level algorithm and low computational complexity of the FMS-level algorithm are the main advantages of the proposed scheme. Simulation results demonstrate improvement in cell-edge performance with no impact on system capacity or user fairness, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to static and semi-static ICIC schemes.