Energy Efficient Medium Access with Interference Mitigation in LTE Femtocell Networks

Abstract

With the rapidly increasing number of deployed LTE femtocell base stations (FBS), energy consumption of femtocell networks has become a serious environmental issue. Therefore, energy-efficient protocols are needed to balance the trade-off between energy saving and bandwidth utilization. The key component of the desired protocol to prevent both energy and bandwidth waste is interference mitigation, which, nevertheless, most previous work has failed to properly consider. To this end, in this paper, we manipulate user equipment (UE) association and OFDMA scheduling with a combination of interference mitigation. Recognizing the NP-hardness of the problem, we propose two distributed algorithms with guaranteed convergence. Extensive simulations show that our algorithms outperform the alternative algorithms in multiple metrics such as utility, power consumption, and convergence speed.