An energy efficient framework for user association and power allocation in HetNets with interference and rate-loss constraints

Dense deployment of femtocells has proved to be an effective solution to handle increasing demands of indoor mobile data. A femtocell not only helps reducing operational and capital expenditure but also improves the energy efficiency of the network. Femtocells are able to increase spectrum efficiency by manyfold by reusing the available spectrum for indoor users. However, it has been seen that traditional cell selection schemes limit the user count under femtocell. Additionally, dense deployment of femtocells comes with the cost of increased interference to the neighbouring femtocell and macrocell users. In this paper, we first analyse various cell selection schemes to improve user association and resource utilization in femtocells. Then, we focus on improving energy efficiency and throughput of femtocell based cellular networks. For this, we formulate an optimization problem that efficiently reuses macrocell spectrum in femtocells with power control while satisfying macrocell users’ interference and rate-loss constraints.