Spectrum Reuse with Power Control for Two-Tier Femtocell Networks

This paper considers two-tier networks consisting of macrocells and femtocells operating in the same spectrum. This paper proposes a femtocell spectrum reuse scheme that determines the shared spectrum and transmit power for the femtocells to mitigate the effects of cross-tier interference between the macrocells and femtocells. The proposed scheme provides macrocell throughput that is unaffected by the increasing number of femtocells per cell site and improves the femtocell signal quality at the same time by limiting the cross-tier interference. This study analyzed the per-tier signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) and outage probability of the proposed scheme to investigate the macrocell and femtocell performance. The total throughput of the proposed scheme was analyzed based on the outage probabilities. The analysis and numerical results proved that high femtocell throughput can be achieved using only a small fraction of the spectrum while protecting the macrocell throughput. As a result, an improved total throughput was achieved enforcing higher spatial reuse.