• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.329-339
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• 2022

Small cells, particularly femtocells, are regarded a promising solution for limited resources required to handle the increasing data demand. They usually boost wireless network capacity. While widespread usage of femtocells increases network gain, it also raises several challenges. Interference is one of such concerns. Interference management is also seen as a main obstacle in the adoption of two-tier networks. For example, placing femtocells in a traditional macrocell's geographic area. Interference comes in two forms: cross-tier and co-tier. There have been previous studies conducted on the topic of interference management. This study investigates the principle of categorization of interference management systems. Many methods exist in the literature to reduce or eliminate the impacts of co-tier, cross-tier, or a combination of the two forms of interference. Following are some of the ways provided to manage interference: FFR, Cognitive Femtocell and Cooperative Resource Scheduling, Beamforming Strategy, Transmission Power Control, and Clustering/Graph-Based. Approaches, which were proposed to solve the interference problem, had been presented for each category in this work.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.41 no.11
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• pp.1387-1401
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• 2016

When a closed access policy in which only an authorized user is allowed to access to a given base station (BS) has been employed in heterogeneous cellular networks, a macro-cell user is used to experience strong cross-tier interference from its adjacent small-cell BSs to which the user is not allowed to access. To mitigate this problem, it has been proposed that a small-cell BS employs a beamforming vector which is orthogonal to the channel of the victim user. However, this technique requires considerable mutual exchange of information among the macro-cell BS, the macro-cell user, and the small-cell BS. In this paper, we propose a cognitive beamforming scheme, in which a small-cell BS employs the beamforming orthogonal to the victim users' channel without any explicit mutual information exchange. Particularly, the small-cell BS finds small- and macro-cell users experiencing the co-tier and cross-tier interferences from it, respectively. Then, it employs a beamforming which is orthogonal to the victim users' channels to mitigate the co-tier and cross-tier interferences. Using the system-level simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively mitigates the cross-tier interference problem.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.1976-1997
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• 2016

This paper investigates the problem of co-tier interference mitigation for dynamic small- cell networks, in which the load of each small-cell varies with the number of active associated small-cell users (SUs). Due to the fact that most small-cell base stations (SBSs) are deployed in an ad-hoc manner, the problem of reducing co-tier interference caused by dynamic loads in a distributed fashion is quite challenging. First, we propose a new distributed channel allocation method for small-cells with dynamic loads and define a dynamic interference graph. Based on this approach, we formulate the problem as a dynamic interference graph game and prove that the game is a potential game and has at least one pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE) point. Moreover, we show that the best pure strategy NE point minimizes the expectation of the aggregate dynamic co-tier interference in the small-cell network. A distributed dynamic learning algorithm is then designed to achieve NE of the game, in which each SBS is unaware of the probability distributions of its own and other SBSs' dynamic loads. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can mitigate dynamic co-tier interference effectively and significantly outperform random channel selection.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.384-394
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• 2014

The femtocell overlaid cellular network (FOCN) has been used to enhance the capacity of existing cellular systems. To obtain the desired system performance, both cross-tier interference and co-tier interference in an FOCN need to be managed. This paper proposes an interference management scheme that adaptively constructs a femtocell cluster, which is a group of femtocell base stations that share the same frequency band. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme can enhance the performance of the macrocell-tier and maintain a greater signal to interference-plus-noise ratio than the outage level can for about 99% of femtocell users.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.1424-1441
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• 2014

Two-tier femtocell networks, consisting of a conventional cellular network underlaid with femtocell hotspots, play an important role in the indoor coverage and capacity of cellular networks. However, the cross- and co-tier interference will cause an unacceptable quality of service (QoS) for users with universal frequency reuse. In this paper, we propose a novel downlink interference mitigation strategy for spectrum-shared two-tier femtocell networks. The proposed solution is composed of three parts. The first is femtocells clustering, which maximizes the distance between femtocells using the same slot resource to mitigate co-tier interference. The second is to assign macrocell users (MUEs) to clusters by max-min criterion, by which each MUE can avoid using the same resource as the nearest femtocell. The third is a novel adaptive power control scheme with femtocells downlink transmit power adjusted adaptively based on the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) level of neighboring users. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively increase the successful transmission ratio and ergodic capacity of femtocells, while guaranteeing QoS of the macrocell.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1481-1500
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• 2016

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication underlaying macro-small cell networks, as one of the promising technologies in the era of 5G, is able to improve spectral efficiency and increase system capacity. In this paper, we model the cross- and co-tier D2D communications in two-tier macro-small cell networks. To avoid the complicated interference for cross-tier D2D, we propose a mode selection scheme with a dedicated resource sharing strategy. For co-tier D2D, we formulate a joint optimization problem of power control and resource reuse with the aim of maximizing the overall outage capacity. To solve this non-convex optimization problem, we devise a heuristic algorithm to obtain a suboptimal solution and reduce the computational complexity. System-level simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can provide enhanced system performance and guarantee the quality-of-service (QoS) of all devices in two-tier macro-small cell networks. In addition, our study reveals the high potential of introducing cross- and co-tier D2D in small cell networks: i) cross-tier D2D obtains better performance at low and medium small cell densities than co-tier D2D, and ii) co-tier D2D achieves a steady performance improvement with the increase of small cell density.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.2014-2034
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• 2015

This paper focuses on solving co-channel interference (CCI) issues arising in the open subscriber group (OSG) mode of heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Considering a general framework consisting of arbitrary number of picocells within a macro cell, where the inter-user interference (IUI) is the main CCI to macro user equipments (UEs), while the the inter-cell interference (ICI) is the major CCI to pico UEs. In this paper, three IA based transceiver design schemes are proposed. For macro cell, we uniformly use block diagonalization (BD) scheme to eliminate the IUI. And for picocells, three IA schemes are proposed to mitigate the ICI. The first scheme, named as zero forcing IA (ZF-IA) scheme, aligns the inter picocell interference onto an arbitrary sub-space of the cross-tier interference using ZF scheme. Considering the channel state information (CSI) of the desired channel of pico UEs, the second scheme, named as optimal desired sub-channel selected IA (ODC-IA) scheme, aligns the inter picocell interference onto a certain sub-space of the cross-tier interference, which guarantees the largest channel gain of the desired signal of pico UEs. The third IA scheme, named as maximum cross-tier interference selected IA (MI-IA) scheme, is designed for the system with less receive antennas. The inter picocell interference is aligned onto the space of the strongest cross-tier interference and only the interference on this space is nullified. The complexity analysis and simulations show that the proposed transceiver design schemes outperform the existing IA schemes in the OSG mode of HetNets, and the MI-IA scheme reduces the requirement of the receive antennas number with lower complexity.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.216-239
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• 2021

The present work addresses the challenging problem of coordinating power allocation with interference management in multi-robot networks by applying the promising expansion capabilities of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and full duplex systems, which achieves it for maximizing the throughput of networks under the impacts of Doppler frequency shifts and external jamming. The proposed power allocation with interference coordination formulation accounts for three types of the interference, including cross-tier, co-tier, and mixed-tier interference signals with cluster head nodes operating in different full-duplex modes, and their signal-to-noise-ratios are respectively derived under the impacts of Doppler frequency shifts and external jamming. In addition, various optimization algorithms, including two centralized iterative optimization algorithms and three decentralized optimization algorithms, are applied for solving the complex and non-convex combinatorial optimization problem associated with the power allocation and interference coordination. Simulation results demonstrate that the overall network throughput increases gradually to some degree with increasing numbers of MIMO antennas. In addition, increasing the number of clusters to a certain extent increases the overall network throughput, although internal interference becomes a severe problem for further increases in the number of clusters. Accordingly, applications of multi-robot networks require that a balance should be preserved between robot deployment density and communication capacity.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.664-677
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• 2011

In order to control interference and improve spectrum efficiency in the femtocell and macrocell overlaid system (FMOS), we propose a joint frequency bandwidth dynamic division, clustering and power control algorithm (JFCPA) for orthogonal-frequency-division-multiple access-based downlink FMOS. The overall system bandwidth is divided into three bands, and the macro-cellular coverage is divided into two areas according to the intensity of the interference from the macro base station to the femtocells, which are dynamically determined by using the JFCPA. A cluster is taken as the unit for frequency reuse among femtocells. We map the problem of clustering to the MAX k-CUT problem with the aim of eliminating the inter-femtocell collision interference, which is solved by a graph-based heuristic algorithm. Frequency bandwidth sharing or splitting between the femtocell tier and the macrocell tier is determined by a step-migration-algorithm-based power control. Simulations conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm showed the frequency-reuse probability of the FMOS reuse band above 97.6% and at least 70% of the frequency bandwidth available for the macrocell tier, which means that the co-tier and the cross-tier interference were effectively controlled. Thus, high spectrum efficiency was achieved. The simulation results also clarified that the planning of frequency resource allocation in FMOS should take into account both the spatial density of femtocells and the interference suffered by them. Statistical results from our simulations also provide guidelines for actual FMOS planning.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.292-298
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• 2022

Femtocell networks can be a potential method for increasing the capacity of LTE networks, especially in indoor areas. However, unplanned deployment of femtocells results in co-tier interference and cross-tier interference problems. The interference reduces the advantages of implementing femtocell networks to a certain extent. The notion of Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) is proposed in order to reduce the impact of interference on the system's performance. In this paper, a dynamic approach for efficiently partitioning the spectrum is suggested. The goal is to enhance the capacity of femtocells, which will improve the performance of the system. The suggested strategy allocates less resources to the macrocell portion of the network, which has a greater number of femtocells deployed to maximize the utilization of available resources for femtocell users. The spectrum division would be dynamic. The proposed strategy is evaluated through a simulation using MATLAB tool. In conclusion, the results showed that the proposed scheme has the potential to boost the system's capacity.