Cognitive Femtocell: A Cost-Effective Approach Towards 4G Autonomous Infrastructure Networks

We study a method that facilitates autonomous base station deployment in a 4G long term evolution cellular network. Small cellular base stations, or femtocells, are co-channel deployed by network users in an underlay macrocellular network. Autonomous deployment allows the network to grow in an organic manner and meanwhile introduces new challenges for interference management. We propose a cost-effective scheme in order to manage the downlink interference from user-deployed femtocells to macrocell users. We name the approach cognitive femtocell in a sense that a cognitive radio function is enabled on femtocell access points, which facilitates autonomous radio resource management. Our analyses show largely improved performance in terms of channel throughput and spectrum reuse efficiency.