Interference management in self-organized femtocell networks: The BeFEMTO approach

Recently, femtocell technology has gained significant interest in the wireless communication community, as a potential solution for satisfying the rapid increase in demand for wireless access, improving the poor indoor coverage, and offloading the macrocell network. Operational deployment of uncoordinated femtocells sets out new technological challenges, among which are cross-tier interference between the macro and femtocells, and co-tier interference among femtocells, in the same spectrum band. The Broadband Evolved Femto networks (BeFEMTO) project addresses these technical challenges aiming at developing advanced femtocell technologies based on LTE-A, enabling a cost-efficient provisioning of ubiquitous broadband services. The BeFEMTO project also focuses on novel concepts such as self-organizing femtocell networks, in which the goal is to develop and evaluate solutions to limit the interference impact to end-users'. In this paper, we first give an overview of the BeFEMTO project followed by preliminary results based on recent development of distributed algorithms in context aware learning mechanisms. Next, the performance assessment of self-organizing radio resource management algorithms and interference mitigating techniques for macro-femtocell coexistence is given.