Two-Tier Interference Elimination for Femtocells Based on Cognitive Radio Centralized Spectrum Management

Femtocell provides better coverage and higher spectrum efficiency in areas rarely covered by macrocells. However, serious two-tier interference emerging from randomly deploying femtocells may create dead zones where the service is unavailable for macro-users. In this paper, we present adopting cognitive radio spectrum overlay to avoid intra-tier interference and incorporating spectrum underlay and overlay to coordinate cross-tier interference. It is a novel centralized control strategy appropriate for both uplink and downlink transmission. We introduce the application of proper spectrum sharing strategy plus optimal power allocation to address the issue of OFDM-based femtocells interference-limited downlink transmission, along with, a low-complexity suboptimal solution proposed. Simulation results illustrate the proposed optimal scheme achieves the highest transmission rate on successfully avoiding two- tier interference, and outperforms the traditional spectrum underlay or spectrum overlay, via maximizing the opportunity to transmit. Moreover, the strength of our proposed schemes is further demonstrated by comparison with previous classic power allocation methods, in terms of transmission rate, computational complexity and signal peak-to-average power ratio.