A performance analysis of power control for cellular systems with femtocells using fixed-switched beams

The utilization of femtocells integrated into cellular networks constitutes a way of increasing the capacity of the system creating the benefits of higher quality links, by getting the transmitter closer to the receiver, along with the benefits of an improved resource usage, by reusing them between macro- and femtocells. However, macro- and femtocells operating on the same frequency band build an obviously more challenging scenario due to the resulting mutual interference between them. In order to combat interference, antenna arrays to steer narrow beams towards the users of interest and distributed power control algorithms can be applied. In this work, the performance of distributed and soft drop power control algorithms into a two- tier cellular system composed of macro- and femtocells using fixed-switched beams is investigated. The obtained results show that the use of power control can provide considerable gains in terms of power economy and system capacity especially for the low-power femtocells.