An Improved Interference Mitigation Scheme for Femtocell Networks

Abstract

Femtocell networks have gained significant attention in recent years due to their ability to improve indoor wireless coverage and capacity. However, they are susceptible to interference from neighboring cells, which significantly degrade their performance and quality of service to the end-user. The study introduced an adaptive power control technique that causes the power level of the femtocell base station to adjust dynamically to reduce the interference caused by adjacent femtocell networks, thereby adjusting the system bandwidth, carrier frequency, path loss and femtocell Base Station (BS) transmission power based on the request made by the users. The interference mitigation scheme was optimized by tuning the parameters of the power control algorithm, such as the transmit power levels and the interference thresholds. The algorithm was simulated with MATLAB simulation tools. Throughput, Signal to Interference Noise Ratio (SINR), coverage enhancement and user satisfaction were used as measurement metrics for the model using descriptive statistics. The results showed that the average performance obtained for the throughput increased by 25.88% from 3.40 X 10¹⁰ (bps) to 4.28 X 10¹⁰ (bps), and the SINR increased by 35.29% from 1.70 X 10⁹ dB to 2.30 X10⁹ dB for the benchmarked power control and improved power control techniques respectively. Coverage enhancement and user satisfaction were nearly 0, which indicates that the technique was of average performance. This study concluded that the new scheme enhances wider coverage to reach more users and mitigate interference while maintaining a higher level of femtocell user satisfaction.