A SELF-ORGANIZED UPLINK POWER CONTROL FOR CROSS-TIER INTERFERENCE MANAGEMENT IN FEMTOCELL NETWORKS

Han-Shin Jo and Jong-Gwan Yook Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea

Cheol Mun Chungju National University, Chungju, Korea

June Moon Samsung Electronics, Suwon, Gyeonggi, Korea

ABSTRACT This paper proposes two interference mitigation strategies that adjust the maximum transmit power of femtocell users to suppress the cross-tier interference at a macrocell base station (BS). The open-loop and the closed-loop control suppress the cross-tier interference less than a fixed threshold and an adaptive threshold based on the noise and interference (NI) level at the macrocell BS, respectively. Simulation results show that both schemes effectively compensate the uplink throughput degradation of the macrocell BS and that the closed-loop control provides better femtocell throughput than the open-loop control at a minimal cost of macrocell throughput.

the users [2]. The schemes in [1] and [2] have different effects on the uplink performances according to the underlying femtocell locations; they require site-specific engineering in which the system parameters are manually tuned and optimized by technicians. Therefore, these methods are not applicable to femtocells that sense the radio environment around them and carry out the automatic self-configuration of radio resources. This paper proposes two interference mitigation strategies in which femtocell users adjust the maximum transmit power using an open-loop and a closed-loop technique. With the open-loop control, a femtocell user adjusts the maximum transmit power to suppress the cross-tier interference due to the femtocell user, which results that the cross-tier interference is less than a fixed interference threshold. The closed-loop control adjusts the maximum transmit power to satisfy an adaptive interference threshold based on the level of noise and uplink interference (NI) at the macrocell BS. Both schemes effectively compensate the uplink throughput degradation of the existing macrocell BS due to the cross-tier interference. Furthermore, the use of the closed-loop control provides femtocell throughput that is superior to that using open-loop control at a very low macrocell throughput cost. The outline of the paper is as follows. The two-tier cellular system model and basic power control method is introduced in Section II. The proposed open-loop and closed-loop control schemes for the maximum transmit power are described in Section III. In Section IV, the simulation results are presented and discussed. Finally, Section V draws concluding remarks. II. SYSTEM MODEL A two-tier orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular network based on IEEE 802.16e assumptions is considered here. A macrocell has a layout

I. INTRODUCTION Femtocells have emerged as a solution to increase both the capacity and coverage while reducing both capital expenditures and operating expenses. Femtocells, which consist of miniature personal base stations and stationary or low-mobility end users deployed in an indoor environment, are located within an existing cellular network; a two-tier network is deployed. As femtocells operate in the licensed spectrum owned by wireless operators and share this spectrum with macrocell netwroks, controlling cross-tier interference between the femtocells and the macrocells is the first consideration for enhanced coverage and capacity. Previous studies have developed cross-tier interference control methods of transmit power control [1],[2] and time hopping coupled with antenna sectoring [3] for a two-tier CDMA network. It has been demonstrated that cross-tier interference is not well controlled using the signal-strength-based power control; additionally, the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) power control promotes uplink performance [1] but does not consider the wall penetration loss. Power control has been proposed to minimize the total transmitted power while satisfying the SIR requirement as well as the power and rate constraints while considering the wall penetration loss under the assumption that base stations (BS) know the positions of

978-1-4244-2677-5/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE

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Wb

Lb

BS

D
60
BS

Femtocell
X-axis

60

Macrocell
(center sector)

current transmission and with broadcast information on the average power level of the noise and interference at the BS, the required uplink transmit power Pr (dBm) per subcarrier is derived as follows: Pr = L + 0 + NI , (4) Here, L (dB), 0 (dB), and NI (dBm) are the uplink propagation loss, the required SINR for the current modulation and coding rate, and the estimated average power level of the noise and interference per subcarrier at the BS without considering the BS antenna gain, respectively. Finally, the transmit power of the user Pt (dBm) is determined not to be in excess of the maximum transmit power Pmax (dBm), as follows:
Pt = min ( Pr + 10log10N s , Pmax ) ,

(5)

Figure 1. A two-tier cellular structure of two rings, 19 cells and 3 sectors per cell. Fig. 1 illustrates the center sector of the macrocell with radius R , where a femtocell BS is located at distance D from the macrocell BS with direction angle . The femtocell BS is located within the center of the building and provides indoor wireless coverage to mobile users. The radio links between the BS and the users are divided into outdoor, indoor, and outdoor-to-indoor links according to the radio environment. The propagation loss L caused by slow fading at the uplink is modeled based on an ITU path loss model [4]: Indoor link (femtocell user femtocell BS) (1) L = 103 d 3.7 10 S/10 , Outdoor link (macrocell user macrocell BS)
d 3 S/10 (2) L = 104.9 f 10 , 1000 Outdoor-to-indoor link (macrocell user femtocell BS, femtocell user macrocell BS) d 3 S/10 PL/10 (3) , L = 104.9 f 10 10 1000 where PL , d , and f are the building wall penetration loss (dB), the amount of transmitter-receiver separation (m), and the frequency (MHz), respectively. S represents log-normal shadowing with a standard deviation of 8 dB.
4 4

Here, N s is the number of subcarriers allocated to the user, and the maximum transmit power Pmax is determined to meet the spectrum emission mask and the error vector magnitude requirement. The additional cross-tier interference at a macrocell BS due to femtocell users leads to a higher Pr as shown in (4), which results in uplink throughput degradation in the macrocell due to a NI rise. Therefore, adjusting Pmax according to the cross-tier interference level can efficiently limit the NI rise and thus compensate for the uplink throughput degradation in the macrocell. III. UPLINK POWER CONTROL IN A FEMTO CELL In this section, an uplink power control scheme for femtocell users is proposed that adjusts the maximum transmit power Pmax as a function of the cross-tier interference level in an open-loop and closed-loop technique.

For the conventional uplink open-loop power control for the IEEE 802.16e standard [5], the uplink propagation loss due to path loss and shadowing can be estimated by both the measured received downlink signal power and the broadcast information on the effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of the macrocell (or femtocell) BS. With further knowledge of the required signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) of the
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A. Open-Loop Control for Pmax A femtocell user estimates its additional cross-tier interference to the macrocell BS and adjusts the maximum transmit power Pmax such that the additional cross-tier interference power is less than the predetermined maximum allowable interference level. A femtocell user estimates the received signal powers from K number of the macrocell BSs, {Rk }k =1,L, K , and evaluates the
propagation losses {Lk }k =1,L, K from the macrocell BSs as follows: E Lk = k , (6) Rk

n0

BSmacro: Estimate NI k (n )

MSfemto: Estimate Lk

BSmacro: Report NI k (n ) to MSfemto

MSfemto: Lmin = min L1,

, LN M

maximum allowable interference power. As the NI level at the macrocell BS is not considered in the open-loop method, however, even when the NI level at the macrocell BS is sufficiently low, the maximum transmit power is more limited than necessary. This degrades the uplink throughput in the femtocell.

n=0
Yes

No

Yes

NI k (n ) NI k (0)

No
MSfemto: I th ,k (n ) = NI k (0)

MSfemto: I th ,k (n ) = I th ,k (0) + (NI k (0) NI k (n ))

B. Closed-Loop Control for Pmax In the proposed closed-loop control for Pmax , a femtocell user adjusts the maximum transmit power Pmax as a function of not only the estimated additional cross-tier interference due to the femtocell user but also the NI level at the macrocell BS. Before the closed-loop control procedure begins, a femtocell user obtains {Rk }k =1,L, K and

f MSfemto: Pmax (n ) = I th ,k * (n ) Lmin

n n +1

Figure 2. Flow diagram for the closed-loop power control scheme where Ek , the EIRP of the k th macrocell BS, is obtained by the broadcast information from the macrocell BS. Based on the symmetry between the uplink and downlink pathlosses, the k th macrocell BS with the minimum propagation loss Lmin = min( L1 , L2 ,L , LK ) is affected most by the cross-tier inference of the femtocell user. The maximum cross-tier inference of the femtocell user, I , should satisfy the interference power constraint as
k

{Ek }k =1,L, K and evaluates {Lk }k =1,L, K via (6) using the same method used in the open-loop control. Additionally, the K macrocell BSs continuously monitor the uplink interference power from both macrocell users and femtocell users and broadcast the NI levels to the femtocell users via the femtocell BS that are wired to the macrocell BSs.
Fig. 2 shows the detailed closed-loop procedure used to update the maximum transmit power. For the initial step n = 0 , before the femtocell user becomes active, the user obtains the initial NI level of the k th macrocell BS given by 57 T j NI k (0) = + N k , (9) Lj j =1
jk

Pt I th , (7) k Lmin where Pt is the transmit power of the femtocell user and I th , the maximum allowable cross-tier interference power at the macrocell BS, is computed as I th = N 0WF . Here, N 0 , W , and F denote the thermal noise spectral density, the bandwidth, and the noise figure of the macrocell BS, respectively, and the interference-to-noise ratio is a system-specific parameter known a priori to femtocell users. I =
The maximum transmit power of the femtocell user determined by an open-loop method, Pmax ,OL , is given by

where T j , L j , and N k are the transmit power of the active macrocell user in the j th macrocell of total 57 macrocells, the propagation loss from the j th macrocell active user to the k th macrocell BS, and the thermal noise power at the k th macrocell BS, respectively. For n > 0 , after the femtocell user becomes active, NI k (n) includes the additional cross-tier interference due to the femtocell user. This is given by 57 T T f j NI k (n) = + f + N k , (10) L j Lk j =1
jk

Pmax ,OL = I th Lmin .

(8)

The transmit power of the femtocell user Pt is determined by (5), in which Pmax is replaced by Pmax ,OL . This guarantees that the maximum cross-tier inference of the femtocell user does not exceed a fixed level of the
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where T is the transmit power of the active femtocell user and Lkf is the indoor-to-outdoor propagation loss from the femtocell user to the k th macrocell BS. The maximum allowable interference power of the k th macrocell BS, I th,k (n) is determined as a function of
NI k (n) and NI k (0) , as follows:

Here, is a system-specific parameter known a priori to femtocell users. If the NI level of the k th macrocell BS increases due to the additional cross-tier inference of a new active femtocell user, i.e., NI k ( n) NI k (0) , the maximum allowable interference power, I th,k (n) , is determined on the basis of the NI level if there are no active femtocell users, NI k (0) . This decreases the transmit power of the femtocell user by lowering the maximum transmit power. On the other hand, if the inference of active macrocell users decreases, the NI level of the k th macrocell BS decreases regardless of the additional cross-tier inference of a new active femtocell user, i.e., NI k ( n) < NI k (0) . In this case, I th,k (n) increases to be ( NI k (0) NI k ( n)) greater than I th ,k (0) , which increases the maximum transmit power and thus improves the uplink throughput in the femtocell. The maximum transmit power of the femtocell user by the closed-loop method, Pmax ,CL is given by

n =0or NIk (0) if NIk (n) NIk (0) for n >0 Ith,k (n) = , (11) I (0) if NIk (n) < NIk (0) for n >0 th,k + ( NIk (0) NIk (n))

N0 W F
NI (0)
k

(13)

The following proposition compares the maximum transmit power of the two control schemes.

Proposition 1: Suppose I th = I

th , k

(0) , then

Pmax ,CL (n) Pmax ,OL for every n .

Proof: Let p (n) = Pmax ,CL (n) Pmax ,OL . If n = 0 , (8) and (12) leads to

p (0) = I
k

th , k

(0) I th Lmin = 0.
k

(14)

If n > 0 and NI ( n) NI (0) , then I This

k

th , k

( n) = I
other

th , k

(0) .

results

in p = 0 .
k

On

the

hand,

if NI ( n) < NI (0) , then

p (n) = I

( = (I

th , k

( n) I th Lmin (0) + ( NI (0) NI (n)) I th Lmin

k k k k

= NI (0) NI ( n) Lmin > 0.

th , k

(15)

As a result, Pmax ,CL (n) Pmax ,OL for every n . The proposition shows that the closed-loop control always provides higher maximum transmit power for the femtocell compared to the open-loop control. Thus, the closed-loop control provides higher throughput in the femtocell than the open-loop control at the cost of the macrocell throughput.
IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Pmax ,CL (n) = I

where I
th , k

th , k

(n) Lmin ,

(12)

(n) is the maximum allowable interference

power of the k * th macrocell BS with the minimum propagation loss Lmin = min( L1 , L2 ,L, LK ) . The transmit power of the femtocell user Pt , which is determined using Pmax ,CL from (5), enhances the uplink throughput in the femtocell while bringing the total NI level of the macrocell BS under control.

C. Analysis of Power Control Schemes Higher maximum transmit power of the femtocell user leads to higher transmit power, which increases the femtocell throughput while reducing the macrocell throughput due to the rise in the level of cross-tier interference. Therefore, a comparison of the maximum transmit power levels between the open-loop and the closed-loop schemes gives clearer insight into the performance results.
For a fair comparison, the identical interference threshold of two schemes, i.e., I th = I (0) , is considered. This is
th , k

For a system occupying a bandwidth of 10 MHz with a center frequency of 2.5 GHz, the macrocell BS antenna pattern used for each sector can be specified by [6] 2 (16) G = G min 12 , Am , 180 180 3dB where G = 14.5 dBi is the maximum antenna gain, 3dB = 70o is the 3dB bandwidth, and Am = 20 dB is the maximum attenuation. An omnidirectional antenna with a gain of 2 and 0 dBi are used for the femtocell BS and users, respectively. At each drop, 10 macrocell users are uniformly distributed in each sector with a R of 800/ 3 meters. They are connected to the macrocell BS with the lowest integral path loss among all possible links to the macrocell BSs. Four femtocell users are uniformly distributed in a building with a width and length of 50 meters, and a single

achieved by

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femtocell BS is located in the center of the building. The average sector throughput is obtained by averaging the average transmission rates, each of which is computed by averaging the instantaneous transmission rates over 6,000 frames per drop in 1,000 independent drops. The update rate of the transmit power of the users is 200 Hz. For the duration of a drop, the simulation operates at the frame level. At each frame, the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDM) channel coefficients of all possible links including both the desired and interference links are generated. The modulation schemes used in the simulations are quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), and 64-QAM, and all are turbo-encoded. The proportional fair scheduler determines the user to which the frame is allocated. Transmission rates are decided based on the SINR required by each modulation and coding scheme (MCS) to achieve a 1 % of desired target frame error rate (FER) in a Rayleigh fading channel. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms, two performance metrics of the degradation ratio of macrocell throughput (DRMT) LT and the achievement ratio of femtocell throughput (ARFT) AT are defined as Tf T T (17) , LT = m ,0 m and AT = Tm ,0 T f ,0 where Tm and Tm,0 are the uplink average sector throughput in the macrocell with and without the femtocell, respectively. T f ,0 is the uplink average throughput in the femtocell when the femtocell users employ a fixed maximum transmit power of 23 dBm, and T f is the uplink average throughput in the femtocell using the proposed open-loop or closed-loop power control scheme. For a fair comparison of the two power control schemes, is determined by (13) when = 1 . The DRMT versus the distance between the macrocell BS and the femtocell BS, D , for the fixed maximum power transmission, the closed-loop control, and the open-loop control schemes are compared in Figs. 3(a) and 3(b) at a wall penetration loss PL = 10 and 1 dB, respectively. The DRMT decreases as D increases for all of the considered schemes as the cross-tier interference at the macrocell BS decreases as D increases. Both the open-loop and closed-loop control schemes are observed to perform consistently better compared to the fixed maximum power transmission. Additionally, the performance gain of the two proposed schemes over the fixed maximum power transmission increases as D and PL decrease. This is because the cross-tier interference at the macrocell BS

0.14 0.12 0.1 0.08 LT 0.06 0.04 0.02 0 100 fixed-max closed-loop open-loop

200 D [m]

300

400

(a)
0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 100 fixed-max closed-loop open-loop

LT

200
D [m]

300

400

(b) Figure 3. LT versus D for the fixed maximum power transmission, the closed-loop control, and the open-loop control schemes: (a) PL = 10 dB, (b) PL = 1 dB caused by the fixed maximum power transmission increases as D and PL decrease, but those with the open-loop and closed-loop control schemes are consistently below the threshold value, irrespective of the D and PL . It was especially observed that both the open-loop and closed-loop control schemes achieve a DRMT of less then 0.02 regardless of the D and PL . Fig. 4 shows the ARFT of the open-loop and the closed-loop control schemes as a function of D for PL = 1 and 10 dB. The closed-loop control scheme provides better ARFT than the open-loop control at the cost of the macrocell throughput for all of the considered cases, as

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7 Lp = 10 dB PL = 10 dB

0.9

AT

0.8

Tf,all / Tm,0

PL = 1 dB

5 Lp = 1 dB

0.7 Closed loop Open loop 100 200 D [m] 300 400

4 fixed-max closed-loop open-loop 200 D [m] 300 400

3 100

Figure 4. AT versus D for the closed-loop control and the open-loop control schemes analyzed in Section III.C. However, a close observation of Fig. 3 shows that the degradation of the macrocell throughput with the closed-loop control is minimal compared to that of the open-loop control. The advantages of the closed-loop control over the open-loop control increase as D and PL decrease, i.e., as the cross-tier interference dominates the NI at the macrocell. Fig. 5 plots the throughput ratio between the femtocell employing three power control strategies (the fixed maximum power, the closed-loop control, and the open-loop control) and the macrocell without the femtocell, T f ,all /Tm ,0 , for the fixed-max, closed-loop, and open-loop power control. Since D and L p affect only T f , all but not Tm,0 , the throughput ratio shows similar trend with the ARFT in Fig 4. It is also shown in Fig. 5 that despite using low maximum transmit power, the proposed power control schemes achieve the throughput ratio more than 3.8 for all cases considered.
V. CONCLUSION

Figure 5. T f ,all /Tm ,0 , versus D for the fixed maximum transmit power of 23 dBm, closed-loop, and open-loop power control. = 0o .
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This work was supported by Samsung Electronics.

REFERENCES
[1] J.-S. Wu, J.-K. Chung, and Y.-C. Yang, ``Performance study for a microcell hot spot embedded in CDMA macrocell systems,'' IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 47-59, Jan. 1999. [2] W.-C. Chan, E. Geraniotis, and D. Gerakoulis, ``Reverse link power control for overlaid CDMA systems,'' in Proc. IEEE Int. Sym. on Spread Spectrum Techniques and Applications, vol. 2, Sep. 2000, pp. 776-781. [3] V. Chandrasekhar and J. G. Andrews, ``Uplink capcity and interference avoidance for two-tier cellular networks,'' in Proc. IEEE Globecom, Nov. 2007, pp. 3322-3326. [4] ITU-R Recommendation M.1225: ''Guidelines for evaluation of radio transmission technologies for IMT-2000,'' Feb. 1997. [5] IEEE 802.16e-2005 - Amendment to IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks - Part 16: Air Interface for Fixed Broadband Wireless Access Systems Physical and Medium Access Control Layers for Combined Fixed and Mobile Operation in Licensed Bands. [6] 3GPP2/TSG-C.R1002, ``1xEV-DV Evaluation Methodology (V12.1)'', NOKIA, 2003.

This study proposes open-loop and closed-loop control schemes for the maximum transmit power of femtocell users. The two schemes suppress the cross-tier interference under a fixed threshold and an adaptive threshold, respectively, additionally, the adaptive threshold is determined based on the NI level at the macrocell BS. Simulation results show that both schemes effectively compensate the uplink throughput degradation of the macrocell BS; furthermore, the closed-loop control scheme provides better femtocell throughput relative to the open-loop control at a minimal cost of macrocell throughput.

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